ETFs and the smart beta story

Definitions of smart beta can vary from provider to provider which has added to investor confusion but generally smart beta products sit somewhere between active and passive.

To understand where smart beta came from and how it has evolved, Martin Weithofer, head of strategic beta at Deutsche Asset Management, takes advisers and investors back to the very beginning of asset management.

“If you think about the asset management industry and how it’s changed, it used to be the whole of the industry was comprised of funds run by professional portfolio managers who would take a fee for providing their investment expertise,” he explains. 

“But then passive asset management became established, starting in the 1970s but really coming into its own over the last 20 years.

"Over the years passive asset management, which focuses on efficiently providing the market return instead of trying to beat the market, has gradually become a bigger component of the fund management market overall.”

Smart beta allows investors to target directly some of the factor exposures active investors used to their advantage over the years.Claire Perryman

Wider take-up of passively managed vehicles has been spurred on by the ever lower fees and charges offered by passive providers.

Mr Weithofer continues: “But then as passive asset management became more mainstream, providers of passive products began to think about potentially different ways to construct indexes to provide the passive returns.”

Uncovering factor investing

The majority of indices weight exposure to companies by market capitalisation, he observes, which means the bigger companies by market cap get a bigger weighting in the index. This is true of the FTSE 100 index, for example.

He adds, looking at different weighting methodologies can produce some useful risk and return constructs that can help meet different investors’ needs, which is where smart beta comes in.

Darius McDermott, managing director at Chelsea Financial Services suggests the traditional market-cap weighted way of investing in an index has a few obvious disadvantages for investors.

“The largest companies have a disproportionate impact on performance, you invest in good and bad stocks and you are generally overweight overvalued stocks and underweight undervalued stocks,” he notes. “Smart beta came about when people thought ETFs could do better than this.”

Alexander Davey, senior product specialist, alternative beta strategies at HSBC Global Asset Management, points out: “You’ve had a number of academic ideas which have been gradually building over a period of time.”