Hamish Preston
Director, U.S. Equity Indices, S&P Dow Jones Indices
GICS Changes Are Approaching
After the close on March 17, 2023, changes to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) structure will go into effect in GICS Direct and in S&P DJI’s indices. These changes will affect most sectors and will change what it means to be sector neutral. For example, Exhibit 1 compares the S&P 500 sector weights at…
Contextualizing Style Shifts
The S&P U.S. Style Indices are designed to provide broad and exhaustive exposure to the market’s value and growth segments. Our index methodology bifurcates a parent index’s market capitalization into roughly equal portions on the third Friday in December, using six measures shown in Exhibit 1. Although the composition of style indices changes every year,…
Celebrating 20 Years of the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index
The S&P 500® Equal Weight Index launched on Jan. 8, 2003, so Sunday marked 20 years since the index first allowed investors to measure the performance of egalitarian allocations among S&P 500 constituents. The index is now tracked by various investment products globally, and it has potential benchmarking applications. Exhibit 1 shows that the S&P…
Watch Your Weighting Scheme
2022 has witnessed a recalibration across financial markets, as investors have digested the impact of higher interest rates amid elevated inflation. Despite bouts of optimism that the U.S. Federal Reserve would take a more dovish stance, and better-than-expected corporate earnings, Exhibit 1 shows that the vast majority of large-, mid- and small-cap indices declined through…
Style Perspectives In Vogue
U.S. equities have had a tough start to the year amid rising inflation concerns, anticipated rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, earnings misses from several mega-cap companies, and ongoing geopolitical tensions emanating from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Exhibit 1 shows that the S&P 500®, S&P MidCap 400®, and S&P SmallCap 600® all declined in the first…
S&P SmallCap 600: A Pandemic Case Study
Index construction matters when seeking to understand differences in index characteristics and any resulting divergences in index performance. One of the clearest examples of the importance of index construction comes when comparing the S&P SmallCap 600® and the Russell 2000. Indeed, while both indices are designed to measure the performance of the small-cap U.S. equity…
The S&P SmallCap 600 Turns 27
The S&P SmallCap 600® celebrated its birthday last week, marking 27 years since its launch on Oct. 28, 1994. Designed to reflect the performance of small-cap U.S. equities, the index’s cumulative total returns have been affected by trends and narratives impacting the equities segment, historically. For example, Exhibit 1 shows that the S&P 600™ was…
The Decline of the Index Effect
The growth of passive investing has spurred suggestions that stock returns may be influenced by a so-called “index effect,” as trading by index funds responds to changes in index membership. If this were true, stocks added to the index would initially outperform amid buying pressure, while index deletions would underperform. Our recent paper—“What Happened to…
Sizing Up Style Returns
After more than a decade of underperformance, and in stark contrast to Growth’s dominance for much of 2020, Value has made an impressive comeback so far in 2021, outperforming Growth around the world, including across the size spectrum in the U.S. In fact, Value’s YTD outperformance against Growth in mid and small caps is the…
How Now The Dow?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average® (DJIA) will celebrate its quasquicentennial on Wednesday, which marks exactly 125 years since the index’s first publication. Before one of the world’s most watched and widely cited benchmarks hits this milestone, here is an overview of “The Dow®,” including its origins, what has stayed the same over the years, and…