It’s been another mixed day – albeit a fairly uneventful one – for European shares. The UK market moved higher despite poor UK manufacturing figures and renewed talk of triple dip recession, but most other exchanges recorded minor losses.
• The FTSE 100 finished at 6510.62, up 6.99 points or 0.11%
• France’s CAC climbed 0.1%
• Germany’s Dax was down 0.23%
• Italy’s FTSE MIB closed down 0.42%
• Spain’s Ibex was 0.26% lower
• The Athens market added 1.23%
Archives of “ftse 100” tag
rss'Monkeys' beat the stock market
Ten million portfolios containing stocks randomly selected as if by monkeys managed to produce better profits than a tracker fund over 40 years, academic research has concluded.
The tracker fund was made up of stocks weighted according to their share of the market, thus raising the question as to whether this is an appropriate strategy to build passive investment funds.
The majority of passive tracker funds are constructed this way. A tracker aims to mirror or “track” the performance of any of a number of worldwide stock market indexes, such as the FTSE 100.
A FTSE 100 tracker is proportionally invested into the 100 companies in the index based on how large those companies are – their market capitalisation. But the new research, conducted by Cass Business School and sponsored by Aon Hewitt, questions whether there is a better way to construct indices and the funds that track them. (more…)