No. of Recommendations: 17
It should be a pretty good set.
One problem with the S&P 500 equal weight is that new entrants to the index list are big underperformers, since recent strong market cap (price) performance is implicitly one of the criteria for entry and mean reversion makes them losers on average for quite a while after addition. Similarly, those ejected from the index tend to be outperformers in the next year or so. So index churn is a very big drag on performance. This is aggravated by the long announcement period for changes, which get front run by arbitrageurs.
Have a look at this article, and the ones linked from it
https://www.researchaffiliates.com/publications/ar...The equal weight index doesn't get quite as bad a hit from this as the cap weight does simply because nothing has a big weight, but it still suffers.
By contrast Fortune's revenue-only inclusion criterion avoids some of this, since it would take a run-up in revenues rather than mere market cap / price to drive a new entrant into the fold. Rising revenues are usually good. (though it's often from mere M&A). It probably still suffers from the front running, though. Maybe it's spread over a longer period of time because the changes could be seen a mile off rather than an opaque committee making a single announcement.
The downside of revenue as a criterion is that it will, at the margin, favour lower margin companies over higher margin ones. Imagine the divisions of Berkshire were independently listed: would you rather own McLane or the service firms? McLane has 2.5 times the revenue, so it would get the nod by Fortune. But the service division has 6.6 times the pretax profit of McLane. Low margin is not a problem per se, as it depends what you're paying for it, but it does correlate somewhat with lower quality business franchises. The Fortune set will have all the biggest one way or another, and none of the smallest firms one way or another, but the sort order near the cutoff will favour high revenue companies without regard to their profitability which likely leads to slightly lower quality.
Net, I would expect it to be a pretty good set, possibly a hair better than the S&P Equal weight. Just a guess. The funds seem to have the same 0.20% fees.
Jim
