Managing Director, Index Investment Strategy, S&P Dow Jones Indices
Canadian investors have long participated in U.S. equity markets, but are materially underweight in U.S. mid- and small-cap companies. In this respect, Canadians resemble their European counterparts, whose investments in the U.S. rarely range beyond those companies included in the S&P 500®. This underinvestment is surprising for several reasons. European market participants are no stranger…
The growth of index funds has, in the main, helped to lower the costs and improve the performance of the average investor’s portfolio. Now, some are seeking to improve upon even the relatively low costs of conventional index funds via so-called “direct indexing”, by which investors purchase securities to match an index themselves, disintermediating the…
International equity investors have long participated in the U.S. market, but their interest has often focused on the globally recognized blue chips included in benchmarks such as the Dow® and the S&P 500®. In doing so, they may be missing out on the long-term outperformance of smaller companies; presently, they may also be missing out…
For many equity investors, the stand-out theme of last year was the reversal in the market’s initial response to, and recovery from, the COVID-19 pandemic: the dramatic price declines in March, the wild swings around the bottom as VIX® marked its highest closing level ever, and the just-as-dramatic recovery to new all-time highs by late…
In 2019, the S&P 500® companies in aggregate paid a record $485 billion in dividends. This year, the figure could be closer to $415 billion, and it could be another seven years before they recover to 2019 levels, according to futures prices. Dividend futures, that is. Index futures based on the level of the S&P…
Volatility – it is sometimes said – takes the elevator up but takes the stairs down. Like seismic activity, volatility can rise precipitously, but tends to decay more slowly; aftershocks and tremors continue to roil markets after any major repricing occurs. The practical consequence is that, once the markets become volatile, they tend to remain…
At the General Election on Thursday, U.K. voters handed a resounding victory to Boris Johnson’s Conservative party. The British electorate awarded the party with 365 out of 650 seats, the largest outright majority of any U.K. government since 2001, and the biggest victory for the Conservative party since Margaret Thatcher’s final victory in 1987. Exhibit…
A new paper published today provides a new perspective on the active usage of products linked to S&P DJI indices, and illustrates the network of liquidity that has developed around the S&P 500® and other popular benchmarks. “Active” and “passive” are colloquial terms, and it can be hard to distinguish one from the other at…
Ever since its formation in response to the “Black Monday” crash of October 1987, the United States “Working Group on Financial Markets” has been accompanied by (persistently-denied) rumours that the group used government funding to make large equity purchases whenever the market fell – giving rise to its informal moniker of the “Plunge Protection Team”. …
When do sectors matter, and what can you do about it? Sometimes the sector composition of an equity portfolio strongly affects its returns. At other times, single stock effects or overall market effects dominate. Sector-based products such as ETFs and futures have been around for decades, but recently they have attracted growing interest. Exhibit 1…