Tim Edwards is Managing Director of Index Investment Strategy for S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI). The group provides research and commentary on S&P DJI’s entire product set, including U.S. and global equities, commodities, fixed income, and economic indices.
Prior to joining S&P DJI in 2013, Tim worked for Barclays Capital, initially within fund-linked derivatives and subsequently in exchange-traded products and index-linked derivatives. Prior to that, he worked at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
Tim holds a Ph.D in pure mathematics from University College London.
It has not been a great start to the week for the technology sector, with large-cap tech stocks dragging down equity indices across the globe. With the current media focus on the industry behemoths, suitably arranged into fun acronyms (“FANGs” and so on), investors in the U.S. tech sector might be concerned about the risks Read more […]
Investment strategies that switch between sectors or industries – and the related activity of using sectoral performances to discern broader macroeconomic trends – have long been an part of professional investing. However, it is surprisingly difficult to find even basic research explaining how sectors are classified, why they are important and how they might be Read more […]
Assigning equal weights to each constituent, such as in the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index, historically would have offered material outperformance over capitalization-weighted benchmarks across a range of markets. Earlier this year, we published a paper examining how this occurred. There are several perspectives one can take, ranging from factor or sector exposures all the Read more […]
In recent years, strategies selling volatility (and VIX® futures in particular) garnered substantial attention due to the low levels of VIX and the eye-watering returns achieved by associated benchmarks such as the S&P 500® VIX Short-Term Futures Inverse Daily Index (we’ll call it the “short VIX index” here for convenience). At the end of last Read more […]
News that the Dow broke through 25,000 yesterday was not universally celebrated. A market index achieved a specific numerical barrier — so what? The importance of such events is at best anecdotal, and their celebration in the media is increasingly regarded as humbug. Is there any truth – one might ask – to the theory Read more […]
In the last year, plain old beta performed remarkably well in comparison to the so-called “smart” alternatives tracking large-cap U.S. equities. Of the 17 different strategies reported in our year-end factor dashboard, less than a third outperformed the S&P 500’s total return of 21.83% over the last 12 months. When they are criticized as the Read more […]
Keen watchers of the ever-developing exchange-traded product space may have noticed an intriguing development last week, as the first purely “artificial intelligence”-based stock-picking ETF launched. Powered by IBM’s “Watson” platform, the fund sponsors claim to use a proprietary quantitative model to select stocks that will outperform, based on machine learning applied to vast data sets. One cannot help wondering Read more […]
As this week’s award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Richard Thaler confirmed, the existence of behavioral biases in finance is no longer a controversial theory. People often prefer a small chance of a large gain to a near-certain chance of a small gain, even if the expected return from the latter is higher. Read more […]
In our May dispersion dashboard, we note that “If there is ever such thing as a “stock-pickers’ market”, then the month of May 2017 – at least in some regions – might be the closest approximation we have seen for a decade.” The subject of what, exactly a “stock-pickers’ market” might look like, and how Read more […]
Since the U.S. election, a degree of optimism over potential business-friendly legislation – ranging from tax reform to infrastructure spending – has played a significant part in sending benchmarks such as the S&P 500 to new all-time highs. Whether this optimism will be justified by actual legislation, of course, is a different issue. At a minimum, recent Read more […]