IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/eufman/v14y2008i1p55-81.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: The Active Investment Strategies behind Index Performance

Author

Listed:
  • Angelo Ranaldo
  • Rainer Häberle

Abstract

This paper argues that the commonly used market indices imply forms of active investment management in disguise. The selection and rebalancing rules make these indices highly exclusive and dynamic regarding their underlying components and significantly bias their performance. Any passive investment tracking these indices turns into an active strategy characterised by market timing and state‐dependent performance. Evidence is provided that exclusive indices outperform (underperform) more inclusive peer indices in upward (downward) markets. The constitution and maintenance rules of exclusive indices correspond to a set of active trading and investment rules similar to momentum strategies.

Suggested Citation

  • Angelo Ranaldo & Rainer Häberle, 2008. "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: The Active Investment Strategies behind Index Performance," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 14(1), pages 55-81, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:eufman:v:14:y:2008:i:1:p:55-81
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-036X.2007.00363.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-036X.2007.00363.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1468-036X.2007.00363.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fama, Eugene F & French, Kenneth R, 1992. "The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 47(2), pages 427-465, June.
    2. Bechmann, Ken L., 2002. "Price and Volume Effects Associated with Changes in the Danish Blue-Chip Index - The KFX Index," Working Papers 2002-2, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Finance.
    3. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    4. Narasimhan Jegadeesh & Sheridan Titman, 2001. "Profitability of Momentum Strategies: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(2), pages 699-720, April.
    5. Banz, Rolf W., 1981. "The relationship between return and market value of common stocks," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 3-18, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stephen Matteo Miller, 2012. "Booms and Busts as Exchange Options," Multinational Finance Journal, Multinational Finance Journal, vol. 16(3-4), pages 189-223, September.
    2. Ravi Kashyap, 2021. "Behavioural Bias Benefits: Beating Benchmarks By Bundling Bouncy Baskets," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 61(3), pages 4885-4921, September.
    3. Isaac T. Tabner, 2009. "Benchmark Concentration: Capitalization Weights Versus Equal Weights in the FTSE 100 Index," Multinational Finance Journal, Multinational Finance Journal, vol. 13(3-4), pages 209-228, September.
    4. Richard W. Kopcke & Matt Rutledge, 2004. "Stock prices and the equity premium during the recent bull and bear markets," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, pages 63-85.
    5. Isaac T. Tabner, 2012. "In Defence of Capitalisation Weights: Evidence from the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 Indices," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 18(1), pages 142-161, January.
    6. Ravi Kashyap, 2021. "Behavioral Bias Benefits: Beating Benchmarks By Bundling Bouncy Baskets," Papers 2109.03740, arXiv.org.
    7. Carolina Fugazza & Massimo Guidolin & Giovanna Nicodano, 2015. "Equally Weighted vs. Long†Run Optimal Portfolios," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 21(4), pages 742-789, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Janick Christian Mollet & Andreas Ziegler, 2012. "Is Socially Responsible Investing Really Beneficial? New Empirical Evidence for the US and European Stock Markets," MAGKS Papers on Economics 201228, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).
    2. de Groot, Wilma & Pang, Juan & Swinkels, Laurens, 2012. "The cross-section of stock returns in frontier emerging markets," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(5), pages 796-818.
    3. Andrew Ang & Assaf A. Shtauber & Paul C. Tetlock, 2013. "Asset Pricing in the Dark: The Cross-Section of OTC Stocks," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 26(12), pages 2985-3028.
    4. Ekaterini Panopoulou & Sotiria Plastira, 2014. "Fama French factors and US stock return predictability," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 15(2), pages 110-128, April.
    5. Amit Goyal, 2012. "Empirical cross-sectional asset pricing: a survey," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 26(1), pages 3-38, March.
    6. Söhnke M. Bartram & Mark Grinblatt & Yoshio Nozawa, 2020. "Book-to-Market, Mispricing, and the Cross-Section of Corporate Bond Returns," NBER Working Papers 27655, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Woon Sau Leung & Nicholas Taylor, 2013. "Testing for contagion: the impact of US structured markets on international financial markets," Chapters, in: Adrian R. Bell & Chris Brooks & Marcel Prokopczuk (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Empirical Finance, chapter 11, pages 256-284, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    8. Russell P. Robins & Geoffrey Peter Smith, 2020. "Selection bias and pseudo discoveries on the constancy of stock return anomalies," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 55(4), pages 1407-1426, November.
    9. Patton, Andrew J. & Weller, Brian M., 2020. "What you see is not what you get: The costs of trading market anomalies," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 137(2), pages 515-549.
    10. Gregory Connor & Lisa R. Goldberg & Robert A. Korajczyk, 2010. "Portfolio Risk Analysis," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9224.
    11. Mollet, Janick Christian & Ziegler, Andreas, 2014. "Socially responsible investing and stock performance: New empirical evidence for the US and European stock markets," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 208-216.
    12. Constantinos Antoniou & John A. Doukas & Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, 2016. "Investor Sentiment, Beta, and the Cost of Equity Capital," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(2), pages 347-367, February.
    13. Eero Pätäri & Timo Leivo, 2017. "A Closer Look At Value Premium: Literature Review And Synthesis," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(1), pages 79-168, February.
    14. Cakici, Nusret & Zaremba, Adam, 2022. "Salience theory and the cross-section of stock returns: International and further evidence," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(2), pages 689-725.
    15. Paulo Alves, 2013. "The Fama French Model or the Capital Asset Pricing Model: International Evidence," The International Journal of Business and Finance Research, The Institute for Business and Finance Research, vol. 7(2), pages 79-89.
    16. Mamdouh Medhat & Maik Schmeling, 2022. "Short-term Momentum," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 35(3), pages 1480-1526.
    17. Linnenluecke, Martina K. & Chen, Xiaoyan & Ling, Xin & Smith, Tom & Zhu, Yushu, 2017. "Research in finance: A review of influential publications and a research agenda," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 188-199.
    18. Pätäri, Eero & Karell, Ville & Luukka, Pasi & Yeomans, Julian S, 2018. "Comparison of the multicriteria decision-making methods for equity portfolio selection: The U.S. evidence," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 265(2), pages 655-672.
    19. Guo, Hui, 2006. "Time-varying risk premia and the cross section of stock returns," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 30(7), pages 2087-2107, July.
    20. Hofmann, Daniel & Keiber, Karl Ludwig & Luczak, Adalbert, 2022. "Up and down together? On the linkage of momentum and reversal," Global Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:eufman:v:14:y:2008:i:1:p:55-81. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/efmaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.