Crude oil is the most abundant and most traded commodity in the world, and it is one of the first places market participants look when seeking commodity exposure. Crude oil prices are also closely watched as investors try to glean clues about global economic growth; even after the collapse of oil prices in 2014, the Read more […]
Since its inception, the S&P 500® Equal Weight Index has outperformed the S&P 500 by 1.4% annually. Year-over-year performance margins, however, are anything but steady. Exhibit 1 shows that the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index and its cap-weight counterpart have gone through many performance cycles over the past 30 years. Mega caps experienced record performance Read more […]
Over the last few years, mega-cap companies have played an increasingly important role in driving U.S. equity market returns. Indeed, the five largest names in the S&P 500® accounted for 16.8% of the index at the end of last year, the highest year-end weight since 1982 and higher than the 16.6% reached at the end Read more […]
One of the common misconceptions in finance is that companies from the Information Technology (Tech) sector do not pay dividends. While this may have been the trend a long time ago, this has certainly not been the trend over the past 10 years. Over the past 10 years, within the Tech sector of the S&P Read more […]
It was a tough start to the year for commodities. The S&P GSCI ended the first month of 2020 down 10.8%, the largest month-over-month decline since November 2018. The outbreak of the coronavirus in China’s Hubei Province flustered most financial markets, and the commodities markets were hit particularly hard given the potential impact on global Read more […]
After a pullback in the market over the last week, it remains to be seen if U.S. equities will finish the month in the black. However, as of yesterday’s close, the S&P Composite 1500, which represents over 90% of U.S. equity capitalization, was up 1.21% since the turn of the year as large cap gains Read more […]
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 Read more […]
There is healthy demand among global investors for reliable and transparent indices and benchmarks to gauge sector-level and overall market performance. This demand coincides with investors seeking out cost-efficient investment strategies and shifting their asset allocations to lower-cost passive or index-based products, such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), from actively managed funds. In India alone, passive Read more […]
Thanks to the clever ad campaign by Policygenius, riders of the NYC subway have been reminded that we were promised glass-domed houses, flying cars, and vacation homes in outer space by 2020. Although robot maids may have come true via Amazon’s Alexa, they definitely fall short of the robot maid Rosie from the cartoon The Read more […]
As we enter the 2020s with interest in worldwide geopolitical volatility, here are some key points about volatility and the performance of options-related indexes the 2010s. How Did Equity Volatility in the 2010s Compare to Volatility in Previous Decades? The average of the daily closing values of the VIX® Index in the 2010s was 16.9 Read more […]
