Responses to a survey of investment management practitioners in Europe show that most practitioners are aware of key academic concepts in portfolio construction. But they still resort to ad hoc heuristics when they construct portfolios. Consideration of risk-return matters is less common in...

"This paper analyses a set of characteristics-based indices that, it has been argued, outperform market cap-weighted indices. We analyse the performance of an exhaustive list of these indices and show that i) the outperformance over value-weighted indices may be negative over long time periods,...