This paper examines the performance of investment strategies involving leveraged and inverse leveraged ETF pairs. As in Jiang and Peterburgsky's (2017) simulation analysis, the empirical analysis in this paper indicates that simple portfolios of bull/bear short positions constructed to...

There is a long-standing debate about whether active investment management can outperform a passive benchmark, usually expressed as an index. The debate is usually considered on the manager-level, comparing the active management return of a particular manager against an appropriate index. This...

Current practice and research in portfolio asset allocation employs necessary assumptions about which securities and asset classes are held in particular proportions in order to arrive at an “optimal” mix of investments. These studies typically employ the average performance in the input...

There are about 900 ETFs trading in the market, of which a large number appear to be duplicative in design and coverage. Some of them possibly serve as a tool for issuing firms to gain market share. We suspect that many of the newer funds have low liquidity, asynchronous trading, and wider...

Using a comprehensive sample of 164 domestic equity Smart Beta (SB) ETFs during 2003-2014 period, I analyze whether these funds beat their benchmarks by tilting their portfolios to well-known factors such as size, value, momentum, quality, beta and volatility. I then test if Smart Beta funds...

Alternative alpha represents risk-adjust absolute return of an alternative investing instrument regressed on alternative risk factors. Over the years, the definition is extended to the absolute return generated from alternative asset speculation -- long-only or long-short strategy on alternative...

We conduct an analysis of Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs), Index and Equity mutual funds and their respective benchmark during the 2010-2015 period for the Portuguese fund industry. For the period 2010-2017 we test ETFs for price inefficiency (existence of deviations between prices and the Net...

Some exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are specifically designed for harvesting factor premiums, such as the size, value, momentum, and low-volatility effects. Other ETFs, however, may implicitly go against these factors. This paper analyzes the factor exposures of U.S. equity ETFs and finds that,...