By Jeremy Schwartz, CFA, Global Head of Research; Kara Marciscano, CFA, Senior Research Analyst
In 2006, WisdomTree launched its first family of fundamentally weighted Indexes, challenging the market capitalization-weight status quo.
Allocating weights based on dividends or earnings challenged the efficient market hypothesis by suggesting that rebalancing to fundamentals could enhance returns. Our fundamentally weighted alternative helps manage valuation risk inherent to cap-weighted strategies that give stocks with higher multiples higher weights and allow those stocks to run without rebalancing on relative value.
We weight our Domestic Core Equity Indexes by earnings because we believe it can lower the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios—a key metric for guiding risk and returns expectations.