Betas, Benchmarks, and Beating the Market

Abstract

This article provides an explicit formulaic algorithm and source code for building long-only benchmark portfolios and then using these benchmarks in long-only market outperformance strategies. The benchmarks (or the corresponding betas) do not involve any principal components, nor do they require iterations. Instead, the authors use a multifactor risk model (which uses multilevel industry classification or clustering) specifically tailored to long-only benchmark portfolios to compute their weights, which are explicitly positive in the construction.