Tag: index funds

Weighting indices

One of the biggest recent developments in finance has been the rise of index investing. The basic idea of indexing is that rather than trying to beat the market, a retail investor should simply invest in a “market index”, and net of fees they are likely to perform better than they would if they were to use an active manager.

Indexing has become so popular over the years that researchers at Sanford Bernstein, an asset management firm, have likened it to being “worse than Marxism“. People have written dystopian fiction about “the last active manager”. And so on.

And as Matt Levine keeps writing in his excellent newsletter, the rise of indexing means that the balance of power in the financial markets is shifting from asset managers to people who build indices. The context here is that because now a lot of people simply invest “in the index”, determining which stock gets to be part of an index can determine people’s appetite for the stock, and thus its performance.

So, for example, you have indexers who want to leave stocks without voting rights (such as those of SNAP) out of indices. Some other indexers want to leave out extra-large companies (such as a hypothetically public Saudi Aramco) out of the index. And then there are people who believe that the way conventional indices are built is incorrect, and instead argue in favour of an “equally weighted index”.

While one an theoretically just put together a bunch of stocks and call it an “index” and sell it to investors making them believe that they’re “investing in the index” (since that is now a thing), the thing is that not every index is an index.

Last week, while trying to understand what the deal about “smart beta” (a word people in the industry throw around a fair bit, but something that not too many people are clear of what it means) is, I stumbled upon this excellent paper by MSCI on smart beta and factor investing.

About a decade ago, the Nifty (India’s flagship index) changed the way it was computed. Earlier, stocks in the Nifty were weighted based on their overall market capitalisation. From 2009 onwards, the weights of the stocks in the Nifty are proportional to their “free float market capitalisation” (that is, the stock price multiplied by number of shares held by the “public”, i.e. non promoters).

Back then I hadn’t understood the significance of the change – apart from making the necessary changes in the algorithm I was running at a hedge fund to take into account the new weights that is. Reading the MSCI paper made me realise the sanctity of weighting by free float market capitalisation in building an index.

The basic idea of indexing is that you don’t make any investment decisions, and instead simply “follow the herd”. Essentially you allocate your capital across stocks in exactly the same proportion as the rest of the market. In other words, the index needs to track stocks in the same proportion that the broad market owns it.

And the free float market capitalisation, which is basically the total value of the stock held by “public” (or non-promoters), represents the allocation of capital by the total market in favour of the particular stock. And by weighting stocks in the ratio of their free float market capitalisation, we are essentially mimicking the way the broad market has allocated capital across different companies.

Thus, only a broad market index that is weighted by free flow market capitalisation counts as “indexing” as far as passive investing is concerned. Investing in stocks in any other combination or ratio means the investor is expressing her views or preferences on the relative performance of stocks that are different from the market’s preferences.

So if you invest in a sectoral index, you are not “indexing”. If you invest in an index that is weighted differently than by free float market cap (such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average), you are not indexing.

One final point – you might wonder why indices have a finite number of stocks (such as the S&P 500 or Nifty 50) if true indexing means reflecting the market’s capital allocation across all stocks, not just a few large ones.

The reason why we cut off after a point is that beyond that, the weightage of stocks becomes so low that in order to perfectly track the index, the investment required is significant. And so, for a retail investor seeking to index, following the “entire market” might mean a significant “tracking error”. In other words, the 50 or 500 stocks that make up the index are a good representation of the market at large, and tracking these indices, as long as they are free float market capitalisation weighted, is the same as investing without having a view.

India post payments bank

I’d once written about India Post Payments Bank, after a visit to a post office, and wondered if it will actually help foster financial inclusion. Now that the bank is about to launch, it seems to be doing some interesting thing, and mostly in terms of the intermediary it will be.

Being a payments bank, IPPB can only take deposits, and not give loans. It is trying to build a platform where it will simply act as a distributor for loans, and different lenders can make use of its customer transaction data and lend to its customers.

Also, since payments banks can only invest their deposits in government securities, the “float” is limited by the difference between the yield on such securities and the interest offered to depositors. Competitive pressures mean that the latter needs to be high, resulting in a thin float. Consequently, a payment bank needs to make money on payments and selling third party products such as investments insurance.

A recent interview with IPPB CEO Ashok Pal Singh gives some interesting pointers about how the bank might go about this. Firstly, the bank will dispense with the investment+insurance products, and will sell pure unbundled life insurance. The logic is that since the clientele is likely to be the hitherto unbanked, they will not be able to understand complicated products, and there is a high chance of misselling. By restricting product choice to those that are highly unlikely to be missold, the bank can ensure customer protection.

Similarly, in case of mutual funds, distributors have an incentive to recommend funds with high fees since they also tend to offer higher distributor commissions. Again, given IPPB’s clientele, the chances of mis-sale are high, and so the bank has decided to sell only index funds!

This is remarkable since index funds have hitherto been non-starters in India. Benchmark Mutual Fund had managed to establish a market, but a series of acquisitions has meant that the market hasn’t really taken off. Most financial advisors in India swear by actively managed funds. So a bank, however small, announcing that it will only sell index funds can give a massive boost to that market!

Apart from selling “simple” products such as term life insurance and index funds, the way the bank is going about the process is also interesting. Rather than tying up with a single provider of these products (as most other banks have done), IPPB plans to take the “broker” route and distribute products from different asset managers and insurers. This ensures that the rates remain competitive, though it is natural that the end salesperson might choose to sell products with the highest commissions/incentives. Nevertheless, with the products being inherently simple, the rates to the end customers are still likely to be competitive.

After over a decade of slumber, the RBI licensed a few (limited) banks last year. It is interesting to see the kind of diversity this new set of licensing has unleashed. Again goes to show that removal of barriers to entry can result in significantly better markets!

During his last few speeches, former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan kept mentioning how full-service bank licenses will be soon “put on tap”. The sooner that happens, the better it is for Indian banking customers.

Extremes and equilibria

Not long ago, I was chiding an elderly aunt who lives alone about the lack of protein in her diet (she was mostly subsisting on rice and thin rasam). She hit back citing some research she’d seen on TV which showed that too much protein can result in uric acid related complications, so it’s ok she isn’t eating much protein.

Over the last couple of years, efforts to encourage non-cash payments in India have been redoubled. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has come in, payments banks are being set up, and financial inclusion is being pursued. And you already have people writing about the privacy and other perils of a completely cashless economy.

Then you have index funds. This is a category of funds that is 40 years old now, but has gained so much currency (pun intended) in the recent past that the traditional asset management industry is shitting bricks. And so you have articles that compare indexing to being “worse than Marxism” and dystopian fiction about a future where there is only one active investor left.

All these are cases of people reacting to suggestions with the perils of the suggestion taken to the extreme. My aunt needs more protein in her diet, but I’m not telling her to eat steak for every meal (which she anyway won’t since she’s a strict vegetarian). The current level of usage of cash is too high, and there might be more efficiencies by moving more transactions to electronic media. That doesn’t imply that cash in itself needs to be banned.

And as I mentioned in another blogpost recently, we probably need more indexing, but assuming that everyone will index is a stupid idea. As I wrote then,

In that sense, there is an optimal “mixed strategy” that the universe of investors can play between indexing and active management (depending upon each person’s beliefs and risk preferences). As more and more investors move to indexing, the returns from active management improve, and this “negative feedback” keeps the market in equilibrium!

In other words, what more people moving to indexing means is that the current mixed strategy is not optimal, and we need more indexing. To construct scary scenarios of where everyone is indexing in response is silly.

Effectively, what we need is thinking at the margin – analysing situations in terms of what will happen if there is a small change in the prevailing situation. Constructing scare scenarios around what will happen if this small change is taken to the extreme is as silly as trying to find the position of a curve by indefinitely extending its tangent from the current point!

Indexing, Communism, Capitalism and Equilibrium

Leading global research and brokerage firm Sanford Bernstein, in a recent analyst report, described Index Funds (which celebrated their 40th birthday yesterday) as being “worse than Marxism“. This comes on the back of some recent research which have accused index funds of fostering “anticompetitive practices“.

According to an article that says that indexing is “capitalism at its best“, Sanford Bernstein’s contention is that indexers “free ride” on the investment and asset allocation decisions made by active investors who spend considerable time, money and effort in analysing the companies in order to pick the best stocks.

Sanford Bernstein, in their report, raise the spectre of all investors abandoning active stock picking and moving towards index funds. In this world, they argue, allocations to different assets will not change (since all funds will converge on a particular allocation), and there will be nobody to perform the function of actually allocating capital to companies that deserve them. This situation, they claim, is “worse than Marxism”.

The point, however, is that as long as there is no regulation that requires everyone to move to index funds, this kind of an equilibrium can never be reached. The simple fact of the matter is that as more and more people move to indexing, the value that can be gained from fairly basic analysis and stock picking will increase. So there will always be a non-negative flow (even if it’s a trickle) in the opposite direction.

In that sense, there is an optimal “mixed strategy” that the universe of investors can play between indexing and active management (depending upon each person’s beliefs and risk preferences). As more and more investors move to indexing, the returns from active management improve, and this “negative feedback” keeps the market in equilibrium!

 

So in that sense, it doesn’t matter if indexing is capitalist or communist or whateverist. The negative feedback and varying investor preferences means that there will always be takers for both indexing and active management. Whether we are already at equilibrium is another question!