The 10 largest multifactor exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the market hold over $10 billion in assets. After one year of live performance, the WisdomTree U.S. Multifactor Fund (USMF) outperformed all 10 of these multifactor ETFs on both an absolute and risk-adjusted basis.

WisdomTree believes that, at its core, factor investing is meant to aggressively seek alpha, but only in a well-informed manner. That is why we conducted years of research and use four academically vetted factors in our WisdomTree U.S. Multifactor Fund (USMF).

Multifactor strategies have become a central part of the investment conversation. While investors still try to wrap their heads around these different multifactor strategies, we wanted to take advantage of the recent break from the bull market to compare and contrast real-time performance—in both up and down markets.

We launched the WisdomTree U.S. Multifactor Fund (USMF) in June 2017, illustrating our views on how to construct and effectively implement factor investing in a holistic fashion. Our research leads us to believe that the engineering behind USMF makes for a good measure of factor exposure among equity markets, so we applied a custom-fit version of our methodology to a well-known beta index: the MSCI USA Index.

As the investment world begins to accept equity factors such as value, quality, momentum and low correlation as best-practice investing, increasingly we find clients attempting to measure their assets’ factor exposure in ways that are familiar to them. With this in mind, WisdomTree set its sights on creating a more familiar factor attribution framework.

In what may be the late stages of a bull market, many investors have flocked to quality. As a factor that may do well on the tail end of rising rates, quality provides investors with the comfort that if markets turn, at least their money will be in companies with strong balance sheets that can potentially weather the storm better than others.