Evolution of Indexing

There's a joke that if you can't find the idiot in the room, it's probably you. I had a somewhat similar feeling on my trip to the Super Bowl of Indexing in Phoenix.

The featured event was a celebrity death match between Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel and Princeton professor Burton Malkiel.

Siegel believes that indexing has evolved so that the biases of cap-weighting (i.e., a tilt to larger growth) can be mitigated with fundamental indexing. Professor Malkiel believes that while fundamental indexing has been a hotspot in the past few years, he is concerned that it cannot continue to outperform; he noted that fundamental indexing has a bias to smaller value. Malkiel also cited some research that points to growth rotating back into favor.

My first meeting was with WisdomTree, which wants to be a big player in the industry, and I believe it will be. It's interested in exploring fixed income in a meaningful way, and we discussed the idea of an equity exchange-traded fund that covered the Nordics, including Iceland. We also talked about the logic of the N-11 (Mexico, Korea, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam) as a logical place for a future product, but a frontier ETF is probably a while away.

I spent quite a bit of time with the folks from Claymore. The Oil Up (UCR - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) and Oil Down (DCR - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) Macroshares are interesting. They capture the movement of oil without having to manage any oil contracts.