Smart beta has emerged as one of the most exciting and hotly debated investment trends of the past 10 years. Going by many different names (strategic beta, fundamental indexing, factor investing and more), smart beta is a catchall term for rules-based strategies that aim to deliver better risk-adjusted returns than traditional market-cap-weighted indexes. Today there are hundreds of ETFs, and, if you count institutional assets, hundreds of billions of dollars benchmarked against smart-beta indexes.
With 1028 ETFs traded in the U.S. markets, Smart-Beta ETFs ETFs gather total assets under management of $903.86B. The average expense ratio is 0.53%. Smart-Beta ETFs ETFs can be found in the following asset classes:
- Equity
- Asset Allocation
- Fixed Income
- Alternatives
- Commodities
- Currency
The largest Smart-Beta ETFs ETF is the Vanguard Value ETF VTV with $47.30B in assets. In the last trailing year, the best performing Smart-Beta ETFs ETF was the GASX at 95.90%. The most-recent ETF launched in the Smart-Beta ETFs space was the Alpha Architect Freedom 100 Emerging Market ETF FRDM in 05/23/19.