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Hamish Preston

Head of U.S. Equities, S&P Dow Jones Indices

Hamish Preston is Head of U.S. Equities at S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI). His team is responsible for the product management of S&P DJI’s U.S. equity index suite, including the S&P 500® and The Dow®.
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Feb 8, 2024

S&P 500 Highs Keep Coming

The S&P 500® closed at another record high today, marking the ninth all-time high closing price level so far this year. Although all-time highs are not unprecedented—2024 is the 41st year since 1957 to host a new high—a few observations stand out when looking at this year’s records. First, January 2024 saw the end of…

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Jan 10, 2024

The Relative Value of Insights

Many investors use the start of the year to make predictions for the upcoming year and to think about ways to express views on these themes. This undertaking is not guaranteed to add value: predicting the future is incredibly difficult and success requires correctly predicting both the drivers of future performance and the upcoming impact…

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Apr 26, 2023

Equally Weighting within Sectors: Impact and Potential Applications

The outperformance of equal weight indices is well documented, especially for the S&P 500® Equal Weight Index’s 20 years of live history. Equal Weight’s relative returns reflect the impact of several important index characteristics. For example, smaller-size exposure and (anti-) momentum effects together account for around 75% of the historical variation of its relative returns….

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Mar 28, 2023

What Drives S&P 500 Rebalance Turnover?

The S&P 500® undergoes quarterly updates—more colloquially known as rebalances—after the close of the third Friday in March, June, September and December. These updates typically affect the S&P 500’s composition and have turnover implications for investors tracking the index. For example, Exhibit 1 shows the S&P 500 turnover at each rebalance between March 1995 and…

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Jan 27, 2023

GICS Changes Are Approaching

After the close on March 17, 2023, changes to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) structure will go into effect in GICS Direct and in S&P DJI’s indices. These changes will affect most sectors and will change what it means to be sector neutral. For example, Exhibit 1 compares the S&P 500 sector weights at…

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Jan 16, 2023

Contextualizing Style Shifts

The S&P U.S. Style Indices are designed to provide broad and exhaustive exposure to the market’s value and growth segments. Our index methodology bifurcates a parent index’s market capitalization into roughly equal portions on the third Friday in December, using six measures shown in Exhibit 1.  Although the composition of style indices changes every year,…

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Jan 9, 2023

Celebrating 20 Years of the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index

The S&P 500® Equal Weight Index launched on Jan. 8, 2003, so Sunday marked 20 years since the index first allowed investors to measure the performance of egalitarian allocations among S&P 500 constituents. The index is now tracked by various investment products globally, and it has potential benchmarking applications. Exhibit 1 shows that the S&P…

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Nov 9, 2022

Watch Your Weighting Scheme

2022 has witnessed a recalibration across financial markets, as investors have digested the impact of higher interest rates amid elevated inflation. Despite bouts of optimism that the U.S. Federal Reserve would take a more dovish stance, and better-than-expected corporate earnings, Exhibit 1 shows that the vast majority of large-, mid- and small-cap indices declined through…

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Mar 11, 2022

Style Perspectives In Vogue

U.S. equities have had a tough start to the year amid rising inflation concerns, anticipated rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, earnings misses from several mega-cap companies, and ongoing geopolitical tensions emanating from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Exhibit 1 shows that the S&P 500®, S&P MidCap 400®, and S&P SmallCap 600® all declined in the first…

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Jan 26, 2022

S&P SmallCap 600: A Pandemic Case Study

Index construction matters when seeking to understand differences in index characteristics and any resulting divergences in index performance. One of the clearest examples of the importance of index construction comes when comparing the S&P SmallCap 600® and the Russell 2000. Indeed, while both indices are designed to measure the performance of the small-cap U.S. equity…

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