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Aye Soe

Former Managing Director, Global Head of Core and Multi-Asset Product Management, S&P Dow Jones Indices

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Jun 9, 2020

The Target Date Industry Needs Appropriate Benchmarks

Target date funds have seen tremendous growth. At the end of 2019, assets in target date mutual funds reached nearly USD 1.4 trillion, impressive growth from USD 256 billion a decade ago.[1] Other than a brief dip in the fourth quarter of 2018, the growth of assets has been fairly stable with an upward trajectory…

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Jan 29, 2020

S&P Composite 1500®: Providing Efficient, Non-Overlapping Coverage of the U.S. Equity Market

When it comes to measuring the performance of U.S. equity market, some broad market indices have more constituents than others. But having a larger number of constituents does not necessarily lead to significantly wider market capitalization coverage. That’s because broad equity benchmarks are usually market-capitalization weighted, with the majority of the index weight concentrated in…

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Jan 14, 2020

The Quality Factor Beat the S&P 500 in 2019

In 2019, U.S. equities posted double digit gains, with the S&P 500® returning 31.49%—its best year since 2013 and second-best in a decade. This continued strong performance highlights the potential difficulty of beating the S&P 500.[1] The question then arises: what strategy (if any) outperformed the S&P 500 in 2019? Our latest S&P 500 Factor…

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Sep 30, 2019

Index Construction Matters in U.S. Small Cap

Market participants generally expect risk/return profiles to be similar across broad market indices representing the same universe. However, indices’ risk/return characteristics can vary substantially. As of Aug. 31, 2019, the S&P SmallCap 600® returned 10.21% per year since year-end 1993, while the Russell 2000 returned 8.53%. So why is there a substantial risk/return gap between…

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Mar 27, 2019

Can You Beat the Market Consistently?

Our SPIVA® readers often ask what percentage of outperforming funds goes on to beat the market over the following years. Our latest research report, Fleeting Alpha: The Challenge of Consistent Outperformance, answers that exact question in detail. In this blog, we demonstrate the difficulty and likelihood of consistently outperforming a benchmark. Using trailing three-year returns…

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Jan 15, 2019

Pure Style Indices: A Finer Tool With Higher Style Focus

Style investing as an investment approach has long been utilized by market participants to group securities based on their common characteristics and risk/return drivers. Those common characteristics, in turn, help investors make strategic and tactical asset allocation decisions. The first-generation S&P U.S. Style Indices serve as effective underlying tools for market participants seeking a passive…

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Oct 15, 2018

Playing Defense and Offense With Factor Strategies

The domestic equity market, as measured by the S&P Composite 1500®, ended Q3 2018 with a gain of 10.47%. Over the past 10 years, the S&P Composite 1500 had annualized returns of 12.05%, showing an impressive bullish run since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Perhaps reflecting the market environment, growth-oriented investment styles, such as momentum…

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Jul 23, 2018

The S&P 500 Equal Weight Index: A Supplementary Benchmark for Large-Cap Managers’ Performance Evaluation? – Part II

In a prior blog, we demonstrated that the S&P 500® Equal Weight Index was a more difficult benchmark to outperform than the S&P 500 over intermediate- to long-term investment horizons. In this blog post, we examine the underlying factor exposures of the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index to evaluate the performance of large-cap managers. As…

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Jul 16, 2018

The S&P 500 Equal Weight Index: A Supplementary Benchmark for Large-Cap Managers’ Performance – Part I

In January 2003, S&P Dow Jones Indices introduced the world’s first equal-weighted index, the S&P 500® Equal Weight Index, leading the way for the subsequent development of non-market-cap weighted indices.[1] Since then, looking at the index’s historical back-tested performance, it outperformed its market-cap-weighted counterpart, the S&P 500, in 16 out of 28 years, with an…

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Jul 9, 2018

Risk-Adjusted SPIVA® Scorecard: The Evaluation of Active Managers’ Performance Through a Risk Lens

Evaluating active managers’ performance through a risk lens is rooted in modern portfolio theory (MPT), which states that the expectation of returns must be accompanied by risk—the variation (or volatility) around the expected return. MPT assumes that higher risk should be compensated, on average, by higher returns. Institutional investors tend to be interested in risk-adjusted…

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