Fundamental Indexing debate in JOI

[ats5g]

The new Journal of Indexes has some interesting articles/interviews with the likes of Bogle and Fama&French on the subject of fundamental indexing.

My fav is when the JOI asks F&F about Siegel and WidsomTree:

JoI: What do you think of the dividend weighting schemes created by WisdomTree and others?

Fama: That’s worse. Of all the measures you can sort by, that one (dividends) produces the weakest value premium.

French: To be fair, what Jeremy Siegel (one of the developers of the WisdomTree indexes) is doing is different. He’s not ignoring a huge academic literature and claiming he invented the idea of sorting stocks by dividends.

Fama: Well, I’m not so sure. He does claim this is a “financial revolution”. But Bill Sharpe was promoting the idea 20 years ago. And the reality is that only 22 percent of firms pay dividends. What do you do with the rest?

Ouch. I guess that's getting academically b**ched-slapped.

- Alec