Sometimes you need to take an idea to its illogical end to show you the absurdity of it. For quite some time now I have been writing about the proliferation of ETFs, or the ?ETFization of everything.? Which on the whole has been a boon for investors. However the ETF is still happy to create products based on hot trends or a favorable backtest.

Joel Dickson at Vanguard Advisor did a little data exercise creating ?AlphaBet portfolios? that in a backtest showed uniform outperformance relative to the S&P 500 over a ten year period. The only hitch is that the strategy being used, an alphabetical one by ticker symbol, should have no bearing on price performance.