A phrase you may have heard mentioned several times lately is smart beta.
So, what does smart beta mean?
Over the course of the next four video blogs, we'll try to explain.
We'll hear from experts who like smart beta - and those who don't.
And, most important of all, we'll be investigating whether it actually works.
First of all, what do we mean by beta? And for that matter alpha?
Well, alpha and beta are statistical measurements for calculating returns from equities - both mutual funds and individual stocks.
Alpha is a measure of how an investment fares compared to an appropriate benchmark - say, for example, the returns delivered by Marks and Spencer or Lloyds Banking Group shares, or by the Schroder UK Equity Fund, compared to the FTSE 100 Share Index of leading British companies.
Beta is based on the volatility of an investment. You can think of it as the tendency of that stock or fund's returns to respond to swings in the market.
Active fund managers pursue alpha; in other words, they seek returns over and above those that the market as a whole delivers.
Passive investors, on the other hand, acknowledge how hard it is to identify those specific stocks that will outperform the market.
Rather than pay an active manager to try - and probably fail - to pick the winners, and avoid the losers, they choose to ignore alpha altogether.
Instead they invest in an entire market and simply capture the market's beta. They're happy to follow a market through its up and downs, safe in the knowledge that, almost invariably, the long-term trend is upwards - and that, over time, they're saving a fortune in charges by opting for low-cost passive funds.
Traditionally, passive investors have used index funds weighted according to market capitalisation - in other words, the price of an individual stock multiplied by the number of shares.
The bigger the market cap, the bigger the weighting.
However, market-cap weighting does have its critics, who say it can overweight overvalued stocks and, conversely, underweight undervalued ones.
Instead, market-cap sceptics prefer funds that are weighted according to other fundamentals - for example, company size, or the dividends that companies return to shareholders.
In their view, funds weighted according to other factors are likely to deliver a better trade-off between risk and return than funds based purely on market capitalisation.
In a sense, they're neither active nor passive, but would like to have the best of both worlds. They want to capture market beta, but in the smartest possible way - hence the phrase smart beta.
Now, a word of warning... What we've just given you is a hugely simplified explanation of an extremely complex subject.
Smart beta is an umbrella term that lacks strict definition. Others prefer terms such as advanced beta, alternative beta or fundamental indexing.
It's also a subject that divides opinion.
In the second video in this series, we'll be hearing from a range of experts with very different viewpoints.
Until next time, goodbye - and thank you for watching.
