FYI: Smart beta strategies are evolving, and newer ETFs from Vanguard and BlackRock appear to blur the lines of what were strictly passive vehicles.
Originally, smart beta strategies sat between plain vanilla, market-cap-weighted indexes and actively managed funds, taking the rules-based approach of indexes and adding a filter to tilt the strategy to express a factor, such as quality or size.
But with the newer factor-based quantitatively managed active ETFs, smart beta may be morphing into something a bit different.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.etf.com/publications/etfr/smart-beta-comes-full-circle?nopaging=1
