Standard and Poor’s Announces SPIVA Award Winners

""Standard and Poor's"":www.standardandpoors.com/ has revealed the inaugural winners of its recently launched ""SPIVA Awards"":http://www.spindices.com/spiva program.

[IMAGE]

The new initiative is granted by ""S&P Indices"":www.standardandpoors.com/indices/main/en/us, and the organization plans to extend the awards, which honor excellence in research on the topic of index-related applications, on an annual basis.

This year's first place SPIVA Award recipients are Yuliya Plyakha, Grigory Vilkov and Raman Uppal, and the team of researchers was selected for the $50,000 prize based on their comprehensive, comparative evaluation of equal-weighted portfolios and value-and-price weighted portfolios within S&P's Indices. The winning paper, titled ""Why Does an Equal-Weighted Portfolio Outperform Value-and Price-Weighted Portfolios?"" used a broad array of statistical techniques to demonstrate the relative outperformance of equal weighting as driven by the built-in alpha of equal weighting approaches, in addition to the higher exposure to well-known systematic value and size factors.

Plyakha and Vilkov are currently with ""Goethe University"":www.uni-frankfurt.de/english/ in Frankfurt, Germany, while collaborator Uppal is part of the ""Edhec Business School"":www.edhec.edu/ in London. The second place winners in S&P's contest are based stateside, and the team of California researchers was recognized with an honorable mention for their proposal of a new measure of liquidity risk that uses exchange traded funds.

The recipients of the honorable mention included George Chacko and Sanjiv Das of ""Santa Clara University"":www.scu.edu/, as well as Rong Fan of ""Gifford Fong Associates"":http://gfong.com/, and the group won $25,000 for their paper, ""An Index-Based Measure of Liquidity."" Their awarded work focused on a new metric that would utilize long ETFs and short the underlying components of that ETF, and the team presented research that examined multiple types of bonds, from emerging market bonds to mortgage-backed securities.

Commenting on the winning papers, David Blitzer, managing director and chairman of the index committee for S&P Indices, said, ""Both of these papers address major issues currently facing investors. The winning paper on the outperformance of equal weighted portfolios brings extensive empirical research to bear on debates of the last ten years concerning how to weight indices. The analyses show how well recognized size, value and momentum effects lead to equal weight performance results. The second paper uses ETFs in an innovative approach to measuring liquidity to recognize heightened market risk.""

The SPIVA Awards program seeks to acknowledge researchers from around the world who are exploring innovative techniques targeting the enhancement of the use of indices in the financial markets. The winners are selected by a jury of academics and industry experts, each of whom are chosen by S&P Indices.