Editor's Note
By Journal of Indexes Staff

Sharpe-ning The Indexing Achievement Awards

After listening to the praise-and the criticism-of last year's Indexing Achievement Awards at the Super Bowl of Indexes, we've decided to get even more serious about the awards process this year. Our review commit-tee will focus on more rigorously screening awards nominees, carefully vet-ting potential conflicts of interest in the voting process and generally bring-ing a good dose of academic rigor into the selection process. And, to top things off, IMN and the Journal of Indexes have brought in Nobel-bedecked indexing icon William F. Sharpe as a keynote presenter to receive a lifetime indexing achievement award, with all the awards now being named in his honor. 

So if you were excited at last year's event, brace yourself: This year, the thrill of victo-ry will be that much more electric, the agony of defeat, devastating.

We are now accepting nominations for our four awards categories:

1) Most innovative benchmark index
2) Most innovative index fund/ETF
3) Most innovative index derivative
4) Best index-related research paper.

Research papers must consist of serious academic research, and together with the other award nominees, will be carefully vetted and then voted on by a committee con-sisting of JoI review and editorial board members, as well as independent observers and academics who follow the industry.

For more information, please take a look at the announcement opposite this page. Send any award nominations to nominations@indexuniverse.com, and any research paper submissions to submissions@journalofindexes.com.

This issue is chock full of good material. In fact, we have enough strong content on hand at the moment for two or three issues. Accordingly, we're going up in size this issue from 56 to 64 pages. And with growing support from our advertisers, we're likely to stay at this new supersized level permanently. So your chances of getting published have just gone up. Send me an email. Dare to dream.

Included in this month's 64 pages are a pair of first rate pieces on style investing. Matt Hougan has put together a comprehensive review of all the new style indexes (and there are plenty), while Jeremy Held wonders if style investing is really worth all the trouble.

Tim Collins weighs in on commodity indexes and the field of investable commodities products, with the best article yet published on the topic. In the same space, Ranga Nathan looks at the efficacy of the S&P Diversified Trends Indicator in predicting com-modities trends.

Meanwhile, George Daniels and Jim Lauder are right on target with a review of the bur-geoning target date portfolios market, while there is some sobering commentary on the real estate bubble from David Blitzer (and some rather more intoxicated commentary on the same subject by the Curmudgeon on the back page).

Enjoy the issue, and start sending in those nominations and submissions.

Jim Wiandt
Editor