The portion of investors putting their money into smart beta exchange traded funds has risen from 49% to 68% since 2014, according to the findings of EDHEC’s European ETF Survey 2015, which is conducted as part of the Amundi ETF, Indexing & Smart Beta research chair at EDHEC-Risk Institute on “ETF and Passive Investment Strategies”. The report investigates the current use of ETFs by 180 institutional European investors. Valérie Baudson, CEO of Amundi ETF, Indexing & Smart Beta, said: The EDHEC Survey findings… incite us to keep on enriching our offering.”

Scientific Beta, a smart beta index provider and a commercial venture of EDHEC Risk Institute, has announced the launch of the Scientific Beta Low Carbon Multi-Beta Multi-Strategy Indexes. Developed in collaboration with the South Pole Group, a sustainability consultant, the indices seek to reduce the carbon footprint of equity investments by as much as 80% while simultaneously being able to create more than 50% additional value in the medium term. Maximilian Horster, Director Financial Industry at South Pole Group, commented: “We are delighted to share our expertise with ERI Scientific Beta to produce low-carbon versions of their highly respected multi-smart factor indices. The combination of low-carbon emissions and state-of-the-art smart factor indices is a compelling opportunity for investors globally.”

ERI Scientific Beta, the smart beta indexing initiative spun out off EDHEC-Risk Institute, has announced the release of a new suite of multi-factor smart beta indices based around fundamental measures of quality, namely high profitability and low investment. The combination of these factors has culminated in the firm’s Quality Multi-Beta Indices, a rules-based investable index which could form the basis of an exchange-traded fund. According to Scientific Beta, the high profitability and low investment risk factors have been identified in academic literature as a source of higher returns in the long-term when compared to market cap-weighted benchmarks.

For many, the investment holy grail is a strategy that will outperform across all stages of the market cycle. Multi-factor smart beta strategies are one of the more recent attempts to achieve this. The solid recent performance of the Scientific Beta Multi-Beta Multi-Strategy Index, which underlies exchange-traded funds from Amundi and Morgan Stanley, appears to suggest that multi-factor strategies can indeed deliver in some of the most testing environments as well in more benign periods.

Assets tracking the smart beta indices of the EDHEC-Risk Institute have risen to over $8bn, with the success of their Multi-Beta Multi-Strategy offering, available in ETF format from Amundi and Morgan Stanley, helping to drive triple-digit growth over the past 12 months. Noël Amenc, CEO of ERI Scientific Beta, commented: “Smart beta is a commoditisation of two essential contributions from modern portfolio and asset pricing theory, namely allocating to factors that are well rewarded over the long term and reducing unrewarded risks through diversification. These two ingredients are the core of the Smart Beta 2.0 offering marketed by Scientific Beta.”

One of the toughest challenges facing smart beta investors today is in determining how these strategies will perform over changing market environments. A new research paper from Scientific Beta offers investors guidance on what to look for when assessing ETFs and indices based on these strategies. According to Scientific Beta, their publication “highlights the importance of a limited choice of factors with simple definitions to avoid the temptations of factor mining or factor fishing, which are among the main causes of the lack of relative out-of-sample robustness of smart beta strategies that are based on factor exposures. It also underlines the importance of allocating between smart factors that have decorrelated excess returns with respect to cap-weighted indices in order to favour the absolute robustness of the smart beta strategies implemented.”

A quarter of investors are using smart beta strategies according to the 2014 EDHEC Risk Institute survey of ETF usage, with half of those employing ETFs to implement these strategies. The survey, produced with the support of Amundi, a leading European ETF provider, provides an optimistic outlook for the smart beta industry. The results point to significant growth in assets under management and product launches in the coming years, driven by a belief that these strategies can beat market capitalisation-weighted indices and the evolution of their role in the portfolio construction process.