The Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) industry has gained much attractivity among investors in the last decade but remains still a shady market with some technicities. This research article aims to address the origin of this concept and its recent tendencies by describing the main features and...

Smart beta exchange-traded funds (SB ETFs) have caught the attention of investors due to their supposed ability to offer a better risk-return trade-off than traditionally structured passive indices. Yet, research covering the performance of SB ETFs benchmarked to traditional cap-weighted market...

We reconsider the question of whether beta-centric hedge fund activity is predictive of superior performance. We construct a measure of overall beta activity of fund managers, Beta Activity, and find evidence that top beta active managers deliver superior long term out-of-sample performance...