| "Today's alpha is tomorrow's smart beta," Jay Willoughby, CIO of Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., told the sovereign wealth fund's board of trustees in a pitch last December. During his Anchorage address, Willoughby called for $54.6 billion APFC to be an anchor investor in a new family of smart beta exchange-traded funds that it would design with a yet-to-be-determined partner. The proposed $1 billion allocation would join the fund's four other smart beta and quasi-passive mandates, which already total nearly $5 billion.
No one in the investment community can ignore smart beta - index strategies that diverge from traditional market capitalization weighting techniques to capture well-documented risk factors such as value, momentum and low volatility. In the past decade smart beta ETFs have grown by more than $400 billion in the U.S. alone, according to Chicago-based Morningstar, which prefers the term strategic beta....................................Full Article: Source
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