Alpha and Beta in Mutual funds investing
*What Are Alpha And Beta In Investing?* As their names would imply, alpha and beta are fundamental terms in the investing world. In its most popular understanding, alpha represents the excess return on a particular investment—a stock, mutual fund or exchange-traded fund—over a relevant index. In other words, if an investor has managed to outperform a certain index, such as the S&P 500, it is said he or she has achieved "alpha." Beta, by contrast, measures an asset's historic volatility relative to a market benchmark, such as the S&P 500, which has an alpha and a beta of 1.0 because it is considered to be a proxy for the overall stock market. If a stock or fund's beta is 2, for example, that means that it has historically been twice as volatile as the benchmark index, while a beta below 1.0 would indicate that is less volatile than the market. The simplest way to differentiate between alpha and beta is to remember that alpha measures relative ...