"dumbstruck" <dumbstruc[at]gmail.com> wrote:

- quote -

Thanks. I guess I should have mentioned that I knew about equal weighted funds,
but was looking for something size weighted, but not by market cap. (Book
value, sales, number of employees, whatever).

Here's the article I had been pointed to:

http://www.cfapubs.org/faj/issues/v6.../f0610010a.pdf

-- Doug

Yes, RSP is an etf that IIRC equally weights SP500 stocks to good
effect; click on the timeframe you want for
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=RSP&...%5Emid,pwo,pwc

Don't expect this type of thing to be passive or supercheap to manage.
Imagine the pain involved to rebalance a non cap weighted fund which
will grow or shrink much less proportionately with market moves. It is
in the rydexfunds.com family, which is also introducing some
interesting other new products in the area of commodities and
long/short products.

I throw in 2 other favorite mavericks that are unusually dynamic etf's.
PWC and PWO kind of cheat the index-following rule for etfs by
frequently updating their index (to beat sp500 and nasdaq). This
powershares family is thinking about pushing the boundary further with
new etfs, maybe because of the recent departure of that overbearing
head of SEC who went beyond investor protection to the point of
hamstringing...

I've been told of a paper in the Financial Analyst Journal that shows index-like
funds that are non-cap weighted return as much as 2% more than market
capitalization weighted funds. By "non-cap weighted" I mean that the size of
a stock's position is determined by some other size measure than market cap,
e.g. number of employees, sales, book value, etc.

Does anyone know of a low cost, passively managed mutual or exchange traded fund
that does this for a broad segment of the stock market?

Thanks,
Doug