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- January 2025
- Case
Index and Active Investing: Vanguard and the New Frontier of Active ETFs
By: Marco Sammon, Luis M. Viceira and Jonathan Kanagasabai
This case explores Vanguard’s strategic decision-making process as it considers entering the growing market for actively managed exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Set in 2024, the case places students in the position of Rodney Comegys, Vanguard’s global head of the Equity... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Ponzi Funds
By: Philippe van der Beck, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Dario Villamaina
Many active funds hold concentrated portfolios. Flow-driven trading causes price pressure, which
pushes up the funds’ existing positions resulting in realized returns. We decompose fund returns
into a price pressure (self-inflated) and a fundamental component and... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
The Passive-Ownership Share Is Double What You Think It Is
By: Alex Chinco and Marco Sammon
Each time a stock gets added to or dropped from a benchmark index, we ask: “How much money would have to be tracking that index to explain the huge spike in rebalancing volume we observe on reconstitution day?” While index funds held 16% of the US stock market in 2021,... View Details
- June 2024
- Case
Tremblant Capital: Launching an Active ETF
By: Robin Greenwood, Luis M. Viceira and Robert Ialenti
The case highlights deliberations led by Brett Barakett, CEO and chief investment officer of Tremblant Capital, just months prior to launching an actively managed ETF, Tremblant Global (TOGA). However, his team continued to have reservations around the launch. On the... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Does the Case for Private Equity Still Hold?
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Philipp Chvanov
Private Equity (“PE”) received a 10-fold increase in capital flows since the Great Financial Crisis (“GFC”) Investors sought higher nominal returns relative to those they could obtain in the public capital markets. This paper questions the fundamental assumptions... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
PortageBay and ESG Analytics
By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Radhika Kak
In 2023, sustainable investors faced several challenges. The first was the lack of access to standardized and vetted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, and equally, the interpretation of this data into investment-useful insights. Reducing reliance on... View Details
- Article
Recovering Investor Expectations from Demand for Index Funds
By: Mark Egan, Alexander J. MacKay and Hanbin Yang
We use a revealed-preference approach to estimate investor expectations of stock market returns. Using data on demand for index funds that follow the S&P 500, we develop and estimate a model of investor choice to flexibly recover the time-varying distribution of... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
ETF Activity and Informational Efficiency of Underlying Securities
By: Lawrence Glosten, Suresh Nallareddy and Yuan Zou
This paper investigates the effect of exchange-traded funds’ (ETFs’) activity on the short-run informational efficiency of their underlying securities. We find that ETF activity increases short-run informational efficiency for stocks with weak information environments.... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Satrix: Competing in the Passive Asset Management Industry in South Africa
By: Mark Egan, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Dilyana Karadzhova Botha
In late 2017, Satrix, one of the largest passive asset management firms in South Africa and a pioneer in the industry since 2000, had to decide its strategy going forward in a market where passive asset management had become increasingly commoditized and... View Details
- June 2020 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Vanguard Retail Operations (A)
By: Willy C. Shih and Antonio Moreno
The first two cases in this series are set in the financial services industry, and explore whether it is better for back-office workers to be generalists who provide the flexibility of being able to handle the complete range of transactions that the company faces or... View Details
- June 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Supplement
Vanguard Retail Operations (B)
By: Willy C. Shih and Antonio Moreno
The first two cases in this series are set in the financial services industry, and explore whether it is better for back-office workers to be generalists who provide the flexibility of being able to handle the complete range of transactions that the company faces or... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Recovering Investor Expectations from Demand for Index Funds
By: Mark Egan, Alexander J. MacKay and Hanbin Yang
We use a revealed-preference approach to estimate investor expectations of stock market returns. Using data on demand for index funds that follow the S&P 500, we develop and estimate a model of investor choice to flexibly recover the time-varying distribution of... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Aperture Investors
By: Krishna G. Palepu, George Serafeim and David Lane
Aperture Investors is a startup investment firm that seeks to disrupt the asset management industry through competitive differentiation by charging investors primarily when its portfolio managers outperform the marketplace. Headed by Wall Street veteran Peter Kraus and... View Details
- November 2018 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
JANA Partners: Impact through Activism?
By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Caitlin Reimers Brumme
Jana Partners, a well-known “activist” hedge fund has announced the launch of a new fund Jana Impact. The basic premise is that the fund will be able to generate superior returns by using Jana’s activist approach with companies that are underperforming on ESG metrics.... View Details
- January 2018
- Case
Environmental Technology Fund Partners and E-Leather
By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Aldo Sesia
It is 2014 and Environmental Technologies Fund (ETF) Partners, a UK-based venture capital firm, has an opportunity to invest in a privately held UK company that manufactured engineered composition leather extracted from waste leather using an environmentally friendly... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised August 2018)
- Case
State Street—The Development and Growth of SHE
By: Vikram Gandhi
State Street Global Advisors was the investment arm of State Street Corporation, one of the largest custodians and asset managers in the world with over $2.3 trillion in assets under management. Inspired by demand from a large pension fund client for better gender... View Details
- November 2010 (Revised May 2012)
- Case
Innovating into Active ETFs: Factor Funds Capital Management LLC
By: Kenneth A. Froot, Lauren Cohen and Scott Waggoner
Kishore Karunakaran, President and COO of FFCM, faces a variety of challenges in launching an innovative investment management business in the rapidly evolving ETF space. View Details
- September 2010 (Revised May 2012)
- Case
Windward Investment Management
By: Luis M. Viceira and Ricardo Alberto De Armas
Windward Investment Management has experienced rapid growth in assets under management in just ten years, from under $30 million at year-end 1999 to $3.6 billion in 2010. Windward is one of the leading firms in the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) industry that... View Details
- July 2010 (Revised March 2016)
- Case
MacroMarkets LLC
By: Robin Greenwood and Luis M. Viceira
MacroMarkets co-founder and CEO Samuel Masucci III is meeting with a strategic partner for his firm. Co-founded with Yale University Professor Robert Shiller, MacroMarkets' main innovation is the "MacroShare," which allows investors to take long or short, levered or... View Details
- March 2008 (Revised February 2009)
- Case
Transparent Value LLC
By: Sharon P. Katz, Krishna G. Palepu and Aldo Sesia, Jr.
Leading index company Dow Jones recently signed a license and joint marketing agreement with Transparent Value LLC, the creator of a new fundamentals-based valuation methodology. The agreement allowed Dow Jones to offer a family of indexes based on the Transparent... View Details
Keywords: Asset Management; Stocks; Price; Performance Expectations; Mathematical Methods; Valuation