Craig Lazzara
Managing Director, Core Product Management, S&P Dow Jones Indices
What Performance Reversals Suggest
Investment results in 2022 were distinctly different from those of the recent past. The S&P 500®, which had doubled in the three years between 2019 and 2021, fell by more than 18% last year, and Exhibit 1 shows that there were regime shifts among factor indices as well. The dominance of Value over Growth in…
Style Chicken or Sectoral Egg?
Anyone who has perused our S&P 500® Factor Dashboard for December 2022 (and it’s a shame if you have not) will recognize Exhibit 1 below. The horizontal axis represents the difference between the weighted average value and growth scores (at the beginning of 2022) for each of the 17 factor indices in our dashboard, while…
Making a Virtue of Necessity
When the market declines by nearly 24%, as the S&P 500® did in the first nine months of 2022, investors typically lick their wounds and wonder what comes next. Spoiler alert: I don’t know. But there are ample historical data to explore amidst our befuddlement. First, the bad news: Exhibit 1 shows that there is…
Shooting Hoops with Michael Jordan: An Allegory
I am not a particularly good athlete, and perhaps the sport at which I am most inept is basketball. Despite that, let’s assume that I somehow challenge Michael Jordan, arguably the best player in the history of the game, to a free throw shooting contest. What are my chances of success? (Stay with me, I…
Defense and Volatility
As the equity market has waned and waxed in 2022, investor interest has naturally turned toward ways of mitigating portfolio losses. Some factor indices can serve this goal, but investors searching for a defensive strategy need to define their search carefully. It’s natural to think that defensive strategies will be less volatile than the market…
The Power of Style
At some risk of oversimplification, the 16.1% decline in the S&P 500® for the first eight months of 2022 can be divided into three intervals, as the market fell by 20.0% through June, rallied in July, and then resumed its decline in August. This story, of course, is still evolving: for all we now know,…
Defense in the Balance
Balanced portfolios traditionally (and definitionally) hold a mix of stocks and bonds. Stocks have been the better-performing asset over time, but with a level of volatility that many investors find unacceptably high. Although bonds are usually included in a balanced portfolio more as a volatility dampener than a return enhancer, during the bull market in…
Time Sensitivity and Volatility Management
We all know that in the long run, the U.S. stock market has performed very well, compounding at well over 10% per year for nearly a century. We also know that sometimes the market performs very poorly, as the S&P 500®’s 20% decline in the first half of 2022 reminds us. For an investor who…
Patience Is a Virtue
With the first half of 2022 in the books, commentators have noted that this year’s -20.0% total return for the S&P 500® is the worst January-June result in more than 50 years. Painful as the first six months were, what might they tell us about the rest of the year? History gives us both bad…
Combining Dividend Strategies
Throughout this year’s market turmoil, dividend strategies have been among the most reliable sources of relative, if not absolute, performance. Through June 21, 2022, e.g., when the S&P 500® had declined -20.4% YTD, the S&P 500 High Dividend Index (roughly speaking, the 80 highest-yielding stocks in the 500) sustained a loss of only -3.7%. The…
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- 2022, 500 Dividend Aristocrats, 500 High Dividend, Craig Lazzara, diversification, Dividend, Dividend Aristocrats, dividend growth, dividend yield, dividends, efficient frontier, equities, Factor Performance, high dividend, index combinations, index performance, institutional investor, S&P 500, S&P 500 Dividend, S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats, US FA