Managing Director, Index Investment Strategy, S&P Dow Jones Indices
Tim Edwards is Managing Director of Index Investment Strategy for S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI). The group provides research and commentary on S&P DJI’s entire product set, including U.S. and global equities, commodities, fixed income, and economic indices.
Prior to joining S&P DJI in 2013, Tim worked for Barclays Capital, initially within fund-linked derivatives and subsequently in exchange-traded products and index-linked derivatives. Prior to that, he worked at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
Tim holds a Ph.D in pure mathematics from University College London.
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…
At last Friday’s close, S&P Dow Jones assigned a number of technology and consumer discretionary names into a new “Communication Services” sector classification. Relative to the old Telecommunication Services definitions, the sector has grown from 3 to 22 companies (not counting dual share listings) and is less concentrated in absolute terms. However, Communications Services remains…
U.S. equity funds following momentum (or relative strength) strategies have generally performed well recently, and their performance has been rewarded with inflows. This is important because momentum, uniquely among investment styles, is self-reinforcing – until it isn’t. Typically, as factors become more popular, their excess returns are likely to diminish. For example: the more value…
It has not been a great start to the week for the technology sector, with large-cap tech stocks dragging down equity indices across the globe. With the current media focus on the industry behemoths, suitably arranged into fun acronyms (“FANGs” and so on), investors in the U.S. tech sector might be concerned about the risks…
