fagan2888 / closet_index_tracking

Closet Index Tracking (or Closet Indexing and Index Hugging) relates to the practice of a fund manager claiming to actively manage an investment portfolio when in reality the fund closely tracks an index. This paper explores the problem of identifying a Closet Index Tracker Fund. This paper first provides a general overview of the regulatory background and the challenges it poses. Then it moves to analyse a set of funds investing in European Large capitalization Equities according to Morningstar’s classification. After calculating a set of statistics on these funds against a set of indices, the paper outlines a procedure to spot potential passive tracker funds relying on clustering unsupervised machine learning algorithms

Machine Learning and Closet Index Tracking

Closet Index Tracking (or Closet Indexing and Index Hugging) relates to the practice of a fund manager claiming to actively manage an investment portfolio when in reality the fund closely tracks an index. This paper explores the problem of identifying a Closet Index Tracker Fund. This paper first provides a general overview of the regulatory background and the challenges it poses. Then it moves to analyse a set of funds investing in European Large capitalization Equities according to Morningstar’s classification. After calculating a set of statistics on these funds against a set of indices, the paper outlines a procedure to spot potential passive tracker funds relying on clustering unsupervised machine learning algorithms.