Brian Luke
Senior Director, Head of Fixed Income Indices - Americas, S&P Dow Jones Indices
Is Fixed Income Failing? It May Be Time to Look at the Index
Last year wasn’t the best time to hold bonds. Nearly every equity market delivered solid gains in 2021, while the S&P U.S. Aggregate Bond Index fell 1.4%. Nevertheless, flows into fixed income products such as ETFs were firmly positive. The leading asset gatherer was total market-type ETFs, with one in every three dollars newly invested…
Preferred Stock and Senior Loan Solutions for Yield-Starved Investors
So far in 2021, the fixed income market certainly hasn’t been very fixed—instead posting negative returns—nor has it offered much income, with yields of just over 1%. U.S. equity and bond indices both posted strong performance in 2020, driving up asset class correlations and dropping yields to new lows. So, when the 10-year U.S. Treasury…
As ETF Fund Flows Surge, Don’t Fight the Fed’s Passive Investing Philosophy
Investing legend Marty Zweig famously declared, “don’t fight the Fed.” With the Fed now buying fixed income ETFs and fund flows of index-based ETFs surging, Marty’s advice is proving timely. In this blog post, we review key index-based product performance leading up to the Fed’s intervention and detail the ETF fund flows that followed. Back…
Liquidity Impacts on Fixed Income ETFs and Passive Investing
Equity markets have fared reasonably well aided by liquidity in ETFs, as my colleague Craig Lazzara highlights. Steep discounts to net asset values (NAVs) on popular fixed income ETFs are bringing an onslaught of doomsday projections. But while the signs of stress are evident, it’s important to decouple the dysfunction of the bond market from…
Fixed Income in Stressful Times
For those wondering what role fixed income would have in their portfolio at record-low yields, they had to wait just one week. On Friday, Feb. 21, 2020, we hit a record-low yield for the 30-year Treasury, as the S&P U.S. Treasury Bond Current 30-Year Index yield fell to 1.92%. The next week, the Dow Jones…
How S&P DJI’s Fixed Income Indices Harness Data and Technology to Power the Markets of the Future
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…
Bonds Saw Green in 2019, but They May Be Red in 2020
Rarely do we see all segments of the market go up in unison, but 2019 saw broad-based gains across stocks, bonds, and commodities. In fact, not a single sovereign bond index we track ended in the red. Considering 42 central banks cut policy rates in 2019, this may have been expected, but we would have…
Channeling Maverick and the Maestro: The Fed Cut Rates because “We Were Inverted”
One of the classic scenes from the original Top Gun movie recounts the exchange Maverick (Tom Cruise) had with a MiG-28. Maverick corrects Charlie’s (Kelly McGillis) intelligence report on the Russian fighter jet with his eyewitness account. When she asks how he saw a MiG-28 perform a 4G dive from above, he responds: “Because I…