Overview
The purpose of this project is to research efficient equity indices. Its output are three internal research papers. The first paper reviews some of the academic literature and research that has evolved over the years in the area of efficient and alternative equity indices, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective. As for its organisation, the paper first discusses the dominant market capitalisation weighting strategy. It then presents a possible structure of a generic index or portfolio construction process that is geared towards alternative weighting strategies. After that follows an overview of alternative index weighting schemes. The document then discusses performance and risk measures. The final section covers an arbitrary selection of hypotheses, theoretical insights and empirical results, all in the context of efficient equity indices, and all based on academic literature and empirical research. The second paper documents a market review of current alternative equity index products. Using historical data for European, Swiss, U.K. and U.S. markets, the third paper replicates a number of alternative optimisation based products discussed in the first two papers and thereby closes the series.
