The past and future of the ETF business has been in the news a lot lately, with the 20th anniversary of the space recently being celebrated.

The discussion continued at IndexUniverse this week, with reporter Cinthia Murphy sitting down with Luciano Siracusano, chief investment officer at WisdomTree [profile].

Siracusano talked first about fundamental indexing:

Well, often the people who are calling fundamentally weighted indexing a kind of active strategy are the defenders of cap-weighted indexing; they're defenders of the status quo. I think after five years of real-time data, people should just look at what's actually happened over the last five years. I remember when WisdomTree launched in 2006, there was a lot of media attention around fundamentally weighted indexing. I wrote an article in Index Universe in 2007 laying out the philosophical case for it. And at the time, people really had three or four criticisms.

She also addressed allegations of WisdomTree's bias toward small-cap:

There's no small-cap bias in the WisdomTree approach because we select our size cuts based on market capitalization size. So, on our large-cap dividend index, we're including the 300 largest companies in the country by market cap that pay dividends, which makes our large-cap index more large-cap than the S&P 500—more of the weight is in companies with market caps above $10 billion than the S&P.

For more details, check out the full interview here.  

Edited by: Ben Geier


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