Marya Alsati is responsible for product management for commodities, home prices, and real assets at S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI), including the S&P GSCI, Dow Jones Commodity Index (DJCI), S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and the S&P Real Assets Index. These indices are leading measures of commodities, U.S. residential real estate prices, and composite real assets.
Prior to her current role, Marya worked in Index Development and Index Management and Production groups within S&P DJI. She previously worked in S&P DJI’s Global Fixed Income Research Group, where she authored and contributed to research papers and market trend reports covering credit, default, and recovery estimation.
Prior to her role at S&P DJI, Marya worked in financial management consulting in the U.S. and Europe. Marya holds a joint honors degree in accounting and finance from Kent Business School and a master’s in Mathematical Finance from Columbia University.The Dow Jones Commodity Index (DJCI) was up 3.0% for the month and up 4.4% YTD, and the S&P GSCI was up 4.4% with a YTD return of 5.8%. In December, livestock was the worst-performing sector in the indices, while industrial metals was the best. Of the 24 commodities tracked by the indices, 16 posted Read more […]
As of Dec. 18, 2017, the S&P GSCI is up 4.6% for the quarter, driven by petroleum, which is up 9.9% and makes up more than 59% of the index. So far in the quarter, the S&P GSCI Crude Oil is up 9.8% and the S&P GSCI Brent Crude is up 12.7%. The difference in Read more […]
The S&P GSCI was up 1.4% with a YTD return of 1.3% in November. Of the five sectors in the index, energy and agriculture were positive for the month, up 3.4% and 0.5%, precious metals was flat, while industrial metals and livestock finished the month on a negative note, down 3.2% and 5.5%, respectively. The Read more […]
In a prior post, we listed five components of returns that commodities futures can provide. In this post, we will delve deeper into each component. Insurance risk premium, according to Keynes’s theory, is earned when a market participant rolls their futures position and the price of the next futures contract is discounted against market expectations Read more […]
Market participants have historically invested in commodity futures-based indices for their inflation protection and diversification benefits, given their low correlation to stocks and bonds. However, the returns earned from investing in commodities differ from those earned from traditional asset classes, in that commodities have no expected book value or expected cash flow, while a commodities’ Read more […]
An alarming picture is being painted by an economically frail global economy: the threat of a U.S. Fed rate hike and renewed credit weakness driven by falling oil prices. The S&P GSCI® (TR) was down 30.8% YTD, with all sectors in the index reporting negative returns for the year, but the S&P 500® and the Read more […]
On Monday, Aug. 24, 2015, the global stock market tumbled, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average® losing 1,000 points in seconds. We have seen similar turbulence in the equity markets in 1987, 1997, 1998, 2007, and 2008. We know that the stock market is an important leading indicator, as it reports on the health of Read more […]
In this post, we are going to look at how April 2015 has fared compared with historical April months for the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index. Exhibit 1 depicts the historical monthly returns (April over March) of the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, since 1987. All returns refer to April over March returns Read more […]
This post examines the relationship between Dallas and Denver, utilizing the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index for each city. The pair was selected based on a correlation analysis that yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.84 between the two cities. This analysis covered the 20 metropolitan indices in the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index series, utilized log returns Read more […]
In this post, we look at whether adding a home price index, as part of a multi-asset bundle, to a hypothetical portfolio could potentially improve its attributes. We created two portfolios, one comprised of equities and bonds (portfolio A), and a second that contained the elements of portfolio A plus commodities, home prices and infrastructure Read more […]