Smart beta funds – passive and effective portfolio management

Abstract

As a result of the technological development and the emergence of new theoretical concepts of investment funds strategies, a new category of funds, known as smart beta, has emerged. The foundation of their functioning assumes constructing an investment portfolio that replicates a specially developed index, the design of which is to ensure a higher investment  efficiency than that resulting from a typically passive investment. With the task of combining the ability to generate premium rates of return with a transparent structure and low management fees, smart beta funds are a very interesting hybrid of classical actively and passively managed funds. The interest of researchers and investors in these funds has been so far limited mainly to the United States. In the case of the Polish market – smart beta funds continue to remain a concept that is not widely known. This fact has become a prerequisite for disseminating knowledge about them in the Polish literature of the subject. The first part of the article presents the theoretical framework of smart beta funds as a consequence of a long-term evolution in portfolio management. Next, the general idea of the functioning of the smart beta funds is presented together with the outline of their place in the structure of the financial market segment. The main and the most extensive part of the article is based on literature studies and aims at an in-depth review of the key technical aspects related to the construction of an effective strategy used by smart beta funds.