Mean Reversion
Over more than 20 years of live history, the S&P 500® Equal Weight Index has outperformed the S&P 500 by a substantial margin. Between Dec. 31, 1990, and June 30, 2023, Equal Weight’s compound annual growth rate was 11.82%, well ahead of the cap-weighted S&P 500 at 10.55%. This performance edge is a product of…
Active or Agnostic?
In order to generate value for his clients, an active investment manager must deviate from a passive benchmark—by choosing sectors, or styles, or individual stocks that the manager predicts will outperform. The manager’s value is dependent on the accuracy of his predictions; the better he is at identifying the best sectors, or styles, or stocks,…
Persistently Disappointing
If you’ve ever read a prospectus (or, for that matter, an S&P DJI research report), you know that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” At one level, if you understand that, you understand the most important thing about S&P DJI’s Persistence Scorecards. For the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Canada (with Australia coming…
Disentangling Diversification
We frequently hear that “it’s a stock picker’s market.” The recent market environment could equally well be characterized as a sector picker’s market. To measure the importance of sectors, we decompose total market dispersion into within-sector and cross-sector effects. Exhibit 1 shows that the contribution of cross-sector effects to total S&P 500® dispersion has trended…
Unwisely Concentrated
Anyone familiar with our SPIVA Scorecards will recognize that most active managers fail most of the time. Anyone familiar with active managers will recognize that they can be quite creative in proposing both excuses and remedies for this historical record. One of their most persistent suggestions, in fact, is that active management simply isn’t active…
What Drives S&P 500 Rebalance Turnover?
The S&P 500® undergoes quarterly updates—more colloquially known as rebalances—after the close of the third Friday in March, June, September and December. These updates typically affect the S&P 500’s composition and have turnover implications for investors tracking the index. For example, Exhibit 1 shows the S&P 500 turnover at each rebalance between March 1995 and…
Balancing the Scales in U.K. Equity with the S&P 500
Our recent paper Why Does the S&P 500® Matter to the U.K.? argues that the S&P 500 presents an opportunity for U.K. investors to diversify their revenue exposure and sector weights across geographies. Since British investors typically suffer from a substantial home bias, such diversification presents an opportunity to improve the risk/return profile of a…
2023 GICS Changes: S&P 500 Impact Analysis
GICS® changes are approaching. On Dec. 15, 2022, S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI jointly announced a full list of companies affected by the upcoming revisions to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) structure. Although the 2023 GICS changes are not as extensive as the Communication Services sector change in 2018, there are still significant…
A Spider Spins a SPIVA Special
Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton was getting ready for his inauguration as the 42nd U.S. president, the S&P 500® closed a little over 430 and the latest edition of Business Week was trumpeting that 1993 would be “The Year of Picking Wisely” in the stock market. Meanwhile, a different kind of security was about to…
Do Friendly Bears Exist?
“Never sell the bear’s skin before one has killed the beast.” Jean de La Fontaine. On Wall Street, bear markets represent declines of at least 20% from their highs. But on Main Street, bears are anthropomorphized as friendly. Here we look at whether bears can also be “friendly” in financial markets, looking at the S&P…
