The strategies aim to deliver an excess return over equity markets while constraining sector and country exposures compared to those of the wider geographical universe. Unlike a traditional passive ETF the strategies do not aim to track a benchmark but do use reference indices to constrain the portfolio and to measure performance.
Example: The process behind the Global Enhanced strategy
All our Enhanced Equity ETFs are built on the same systematic investment approach. To illustrate how the strategy works in practice, we’ll look at the Invesco Global Enhanced Equity UCITS ETF as an example, which uses the MSCI World index for performance comparison purposes.
The IQS team use a proprietary model to assess and rank the attractiveness of equities in a global universe of liquid large- and mid-capitalisation developed market securities. Comparisons are conducted within industry groups in each region to ensure comparability. The starting universe comprises around 3,000 stocks, twice the MSCI World index, providing a greater opportunity set for selecting the model portfolio.
An optimisation process is applied, looking for the best trade-off between the fund’s exposure to Value, Quality and Momentum factors, risk considerations and transaction costs. This proprietary model ensures a broad diversified portfolio both in terms of risk contribution from individual stocks as well as from the three factors. The final portfolio will generally comprise 400-500 stocks. The entire process is repeated monthly.
Why do we target these three factors?
The Value, Quality, and Momentum factors are robustly supported by more than four decades of research into factor portfolios by the IQS team. Moreover, an active strategy allows for the continual refinement and improvement of these proprietary factor models, which now incorporate signals that were impossible to source in the past, such as big data approaches like credit card spending, and other modern techniques such as natural language processing.
But while the factor definitions and the data sets that support them have become more sophisticated, the underlying financial motivations for each factor remain as simple as ever:
Value: Favouring stocks that are inexpensive relative to their peers in expectation that cheap stocks will outperform expensive ones
Momentum: Favouring stocks exhibiting strong price performance in expectation that trends will persist for a while
Quality: Favouring stocks of companies with strong balance sheets in expectation that high quality stocks will outperform low quality
All factors are sector and industry neutral and designed to have a neutral beta to the equity market.
Combining factors has improved returns from any individual factor over time
Certain equity risk factors have demonstrated the potential to outperform the broad market over the long term but individually can be volatile especially over shorter time periods. The ETF aims to reduce that volatility by combining factors with an optimised approach.