Scientific Beta

The EDHEC-Risk European Index Survey 2011 analyses the current uses of and opinions on stock, bond and equity volatility indices with the aim of providing unique insight into the users’ perspective in the index industry. The survey enabled opinions from 104 institutional investment managers to be gathered, which represent approximately seven trillion Euros of assets under management.

As the choice of an index is a crucial step in both asset allocation and performance measurements, it is useful to investigate index use and perceptions about indices. The EDHEC-Risk European Index Survey 2011 analyses the current uses of and opinions on stock, bond and equity volatility indices with the aim of providing unique insight into the users’ perspective in the index industry. Furthermore, there is a growing body of research on index construction and index use. Recent studies assess current indices and also propose alternative approaches to construct indices. This survey also serves as a tool to explore views of institutional index users on the conclusions of the literature. 

The survey enabled opinions from 104 institutional investment managers to be gathered, which represent approximately seven trillion Euros of assets under management. This represents more than half of all assets under management by the European asset management industry. The respondents are from asset management companies, pension funds and insurance firms located all over Europe. The opinions collected reflect investors’ overall judgement on index quality, on the key issues they see with current indices, and the likely future trends for the index landscape

An article based on this survey was published in the Summer 2012 issue of the Journal of Index Investing.