Oct 26, 2020

Large and In Charge? Giant Firms atop Market Is Nothing New.

While the types of businesses most prominent in the market vary through time, the fact that a small subset of companies’ stocks account for an outsized portion of the stock market is not new. Moreover, research suggests these stocks’ best performance might be in the rearview mirror. The takeaway is that relying on well-established investing…

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Oct 26, 2020

A Supply Drop and Demand Pickup Pushed Soybeans to a Three-Year High

Only a few months ago, it seemed that global soybean supplies were more than ample, and in the case of the U.S., a semi-permanent soybean mountain had been built in the wake of damaged demand from its top customer, China. Fast forward to late October 2020, and the S&P GSCI Soybeans is up 29% since…

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Oct 22, 2020

Latin American Equity Markets Struggled to Stay Positive during Q3 amid Broader Global Equity Market Rally

In Q3 2020, we saw a continuation of the technology-led global equity market rebound with the S&P 500® up 8.9%, the S&P Europe 350® up 4.3%, and the S&P Pan Asia BMI up 8.9%, while the S&P Developed Ex-U.S. BMI and the S&P Emerging BMI were up 6.3% and 9.0%, respectively. The story was different…

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Oct 22, 2020

Indian Investments in Global Equities: From Zero to Hero

India has been one among many countries that favor a strong home bias in their investment portfolios. There have been many theories put forth on what causes the bias and research has been undertaken to understand it. Whether it is the ease of local information access, regulatory concerns, investor preferences, cost concerns, transactional viability, or…

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Oct 21, 2020

The S&P Global BMI’s Comprehensive Small-Cap Segment

The S&P Global BMI’s small-cap segment provides the most comprehensive measure of global small-cap securities in the market. Introduced in 1989, the S&P Developed SmallCap was the first global index covering the small-cap size range.1 At the time, international equity investing almost exclusively focused on large- and mid-cap companies, as defined by MSCI’s “Standard” index…

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Oct 21, 2020

The Unrewarded Risk of Supernormal Fund Returns

The recently released SPIVA® Europe Mid-Year 2020 Scorecard had the unique opportunity to pit the performance of active funds against their passive benchmarks through an exceptionally rare event. The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic brought a period of extreme volatility, the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since the global financial…

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Oct 19, 2020

Dissecting Performance Characteristics of Growth Factors in Australian Small-Cap Equities

In our previous blog, we suggested growth factors with longer lookback periods may be more effective for constructing growth factor portfolios in Australian small-cap equities. In this blog, we examine the performance cyclicality, factor exposure, risk/return decomposition, and factor correlation for the long-term growth factor portfolios.1 From April 20, 2001, to June 30, 2020, the…

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Oct 19, 2020

Active U.K. Income Funds Endure Challenging Times

The U.K. has been one of the worst-hit countries in developed markets in terms of dividend cuts in 2020. One in two dividend-paying companies in the S&P United Kingdom BMI have cut dividends, while half of the remaining companies are also expected to cut dividends.1 A tough year indeed for equity income managers, as opportunity…

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Oct 18, 2020

Global Islamic Indices Continue to Outperform, Gaining up to 13% over Conventional Benchmarks YTD

Global equities withstood a slump in the last month of the quarter, ultimately gaining 8.1% in Q3 2020 and entering positive territory YTD, as measured by the S&P Global BMI. Meanwhile, Shariah-compliant benchmarks,  including the S&P Global BMI Shariah and Dow Jones Islamic Market (DJIM) World Index, significantly outperformed conventional indices, ultimately gaining an advantage…

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Oct 15, 2020

How Target Outcome Indices Work

Indexing is democratizing access to defined outcomes, providing a simple, transparent, index-based blueprint for target outcome strategies that can be applied to both active and passive vehicles. Take a closer look at what makes these indices tick and the range of potential applications for these innovative tools.

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