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Smart Bet An Approach For Investing?

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‘Smart Beta’ an Approach to Investing?

The term ‘Smart Beta’ is a catchy title for an increasingly significant approach relating to exchange traded products (ETPs). Particularly its potential ability to outperform standard benchmark indexes has resulted in its market appeal and growth. However with its expansion warrants the necessity to educate investors, in order to understand the suitability, benefits and limitations of this approach.

Limitations with previous approaches?

Before we analyse the foundations of smart beta approach, an understanding of why it has emerged is essential. As with all progressions and new approaches within the financial industry, the smart beta approach has gained popularity as an alternative due to flaws …show more content…

It would then rebalance when needed i.e. buying and selling of stocks, to help revise weightings to reflect changes in the index over time. This result in an adverse selection as more weighting will continue to be allocated to large companies such as CBA that have a higher price is higher.

On the other end of the spectrum choosing an active approach presents its own issues. Finding consistent performing active fund managers who can deliver returns greater than the market is very rare. According to Standard & Poor’s SPIVA Australia scorecard in 2012, approximately 69 percent of active retail Australian equity funds failed to beat the S&P/ASX Accumulation index and 72 per cent of active international equity funds failed to beat the benchmark. This coupled with high premiums charged for active management and lack of transparency in managing processes diminishes the appeal of active management approach further.

Understanding Smart Beta

The ‘smart beta’ approach should be more accurately described as ‘strategic beta’ as it aims on improving the flaws of passive index based approaches. It has become an umbrella term for alternative weighting and factor based investing. In essence you take an active approach to choosing the rules to base your fund. But once set, the rules passively

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