The Dow: 130 Years as the Original Index Icon
The Dow’s longevity has been earned through sustained attention to governance, methodology and relevance. Explore how this global index icon’s continued evolution helps it track a changing market.
The Market Measure: In the Shadows of Giants
How has index concentration shifted historically and why might a diversified, cap-weighted benchmark like the S&P 500 already be tracking tomorrow’s market giants? S&P DJI’s Ben Vörös sits down with Tim Edwards to discuss Tim’s latest research, In the Shadows of Giants, and examine whether the dominance of a few large companies may be a signal of risk…
130 Years of The Dow: Why It Still Matters to Asia-Pacific
How Wall Street’s Oldest Barometer Impacts Markets from Singapore to Seoul When Charles Dow published his first industrial average on May 26, 1896, Asia’s great stock exchanges had barely been born. Tokyo’s bourse was just 15 years old; Hong Kong’s exchange had yet to open its doors. Today, many Asian markets take cues from the…
- Categories S&P 500 & DJIA
- Tags Asia Pacific, DJIA, Dow Jones Industrial Average, The Dow, U.S. Equities
- Categories
- S&P 500 & DJIA
Why Do U.S. Equities and the S&P 500 Matter in South Korea?
S&P DJI’s Sue Lee examines the importance of the S&P 500 in the global equity opportunity set, key diversification and sector composition differences between notable U.S. equity and Korean benchmarks and the challenges faced by active managers in the U.S. and South Korea to outperform this iconic index.
The Dow Hits 50,000!
The Dow Jones Industrial Average® (DJIA) just closed above 50,000 for the first time in its near 130-year history. The Dow®’s latest milestone marks the third time this decade that the U.S. equity barometer first surpassed a 10,000 increment and—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given successive milestones require smaller gains to be achieved—the latest milestone came in record…
2026 Is the Year of the Stock Picker?
Recent market commentary has declared that 2025 was a brutal year for stock picking, with USD 1 trillion pulled out of active equity mutual funds during the year, according to the Investment Company Institute. The year was characterized by sharp double-digit swings for the S&P 500®, and in such environments filled with bouts of volatility,…
Cautioning the Clairvoyant
December is typically when we hear Wall Street strategists announce their forecasts for the S&P 500® for the year ahead, and this year has been no exception: 2026 forecasts have ranged from a relatively bearish 7,100 from Bank of America to a bullish 8,000 from Deutsche Bank. But how accurate have these forecasts been in…
Animal Spirits or Anxiety?
Big Tech and the strength of the Magnificent 7 stocks have powered the S&P 500® to 36 all-time closing highs through the end of October. Amid the euphoria, nervousness about the AI boom1 has sent jitters through the market, most recently with SoftBank’s sale of its stake in Nvidia. The extreme level of mega-cap dominance…
Skewing Success
The results from our SPIVA® U.S. Mid-Year 2025 Scorecard demonstrate a relatively better start to the year for active managers, with 54% of U.S. large-cap funds underperforming the S&P 500®, slightly better than the 65% reported in 2024. However, Exhibit 1 shows that over the more than 24-year history of our SPIVA U.S. Scorecard, majority…
Indicization Nation
To indicize means to provide, in passive form, a strategy formerly available only via active management. Until the early 1970s, there were no index funds; all assets were managed actively. The shift of assets from active to passive management is one of the most important trends in modern financial history. Our recent Annual Survey of…
