Market IndicesBases, Biases and Beyond

Résumé

Market Indices are perhaps one of the most well known concepts in finance. They have also a crucial role in the professional financial field: hundreds of institutional investors, pension funds or investment banks use, follow and create market indexes. Since 1880, indexes have spread over the world developing a huge industry. The Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), the CAPM or the efficiency analysis contributed to this expansion, and theoretical and empirical studies concluded passive investments (or indexing) were winning strategies. Indexing grew exponentially supported by lower management costs, simplification of the manager selection, superior performance in average, and the EMH and CAPM fever. In the last 20 years indexed institutional assets have grown 40% annually. Having in mind the importance of indexing, it is really shocking not to find a complete and deep analysis of market indexes. No many books or articles about index construction are available. Regarding this reality, the main objective of this thesis was to contribute with a complete theoretical and empirical analysis of market indexes. A deep literature analysis is presented and completed with an empirical study in three articles. In the first article, a revision of financial fundamental pillars is provided. This revision is absolutely essential to understand theoretical and empirical bases of indexing and hypotheses underlying index construction. The analysis let us present five market index biases (the sample, the construction, the efficiency and the active bias, and finally, tracking error). The definition of these biases is fundamental to understand how indexes can be improved. In the second article, a deep Market Index analysis is presented. After an historical revision and a discussion about functions of an index and desirable characteristics, market index's biases are provided and studied. The author pays attention to how these biases are created and how the can be mitigated. Finally, in the last article, Minimum Risk Indices are generated for the Spanish, American and Argentinean Stock Markets. Minimum Risk Indices using VaR provide market indices with less risk and with higher profitability in some cases, due to the partial elimination of some market index biases, specially, the efficiency one.KEYWORDS: Market Indices, Biases, Passive Investment, Prtfolio Management, Minimun Risk Indices.