In financial markets where assets, e.g. equities, are traded simultaneously the main approach to detect similarities and differences in price return patterns is to study correlation (or covariance) matrices. However, correlation matrices lack the notion of hierarchy, an important piece of information useful for investigating the evolution of asset prices.

"Looking at portfolio construction practices in global real estate securities funds over the past decade-plus, the one thing that asset owners probably want to ask about their actively managed allocations is "Why won't active managers pick stocks?" comments Witold Witkiewicz, Founder of Kania Advisors.

Kania Global Agriculture CAI Index outperformed its market-cap weighted benchmark by 182bps in the month of June 2019, taking the 3-month and 6-month (and YTD) outperformance to 118bps and 514bps respectively.

Kania Global Real Estate Indices, CAI and CORE smart beta indices, can be used to replicate the performance of actively managed products to a high degree.

Speaking today at Exchange Traded Forum 2019 in London organized by Radius Europe and sponsored by the Financial Times, among others, Witold Witkiewicz explained why institutional investors allocating to listed real estate are facing significant inefficiencies in both actively managed options as well as those based on general equity market factors and the solutions that can fundamentally improve alpha generation.

Kania Advisors will from today publish its new alternative beta indices for global agriculture equities, the Kania Global Agriculture CAI Index. The agriculture indices are a natural continuation of our focus on real assets and we will continue to develop solutions to help clients improve analytical processes, idea generation and risk management across listed real assets.

Factors specific to real estate provided positive performance in #smartbeta indices compared to general fundamental factors applied to global real estate securities sector.

Investors with exposure to factor based strategies are likely to have value (or growth, being the opposite so we will only refer to value here) as their main allocation. In this note we aim to illustrate that value, as commonly defined, is likely to continue to underperform due to structural aspects.