There have been several studies of alternative equity index strategies which suggest better investment opportunities with higher risk adjusted return pointing out empirical evidence of inefficient risk-return trade-off implied in the market-cap weighted index. Commercial products based on these strategies, regarded as passive equity strategies, become more popular in the U.S. and European stock markets. We investigates whether these strategies are also valid in Korean stock market and our empirical results add support to their efficacy.
From Fama-French 3-factor analysis, we find that the excess return of alternative equity index is attributed to market, size and value factors and it does not show a significantly positive alpha. Even without positive alpha, however, these strategies are valuable to investors in the sense that they offer opportunities to fully exploit size and value premium with long-only portfolios. The advantage of these strategies is more straightforward recalling the fact that rebalancing of Fama-French factor portfolios involves short-sale and high turnover.
