Since its inception, the S&P 500® Equal Weight Index has outperformed the S&P 500 by 1.4% annually. Year-over-year performance margins, however, are anything but steady. Exhibit 1 shows that the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index and its cap-weight counterpart have gone through many performance cycles over the past 30 years. Mega caps experienced record performance Read more […]
One of the common misconceptions in finance is that companies from the Information Technology (Tech) sector do not pay dividends. While this may have been the trend a long time ago, this has certainly not been the trend over the past 10 years. Over the past 10 years, within the Tech sector of the S&P Read more […]
As we enter the 2020s with interest in worldwide geopolitical volatility, here are some key points about volatility and the performance of options-related indexes the 2010s. How Did Equity Volatility in the 2010s Compare to Volatility in Previous Decades? The average of the daily closing values of the VIX® Index in the 2010s was 16.9 Read more […]
In 2019, U.S. equities posted double digit gains, with the S&P 500® returning 31.49%—its best year since 2013 and second-best in a decade. This continued strong performance highlights the potential difficulty of beating the S&P 500.[1] The question then arises: what strategy (if any) outperformed the S&P 500 in 2019? Our latest S&P 500 Factor Read more […]
Summary With Q3’s earnings season substantially complete, 2019 earnings for S&P 500 companies are expected to decline on a year-over-year basis. After several strong quarters last year, the first three quarters this year have seen marked earnings deceleration. Providing 1/3 of historical S&P 500 total returns, dividends could become important when the market may be Read more […]
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 Read more […]
The Wall Street Journal recently quoted several active managers who claim that “conditions for stock picking are improving”. Their rationale is that declining correlations among stocks in the S&P 500 have made it easier for active managers to select stocks based on fundamental analysis. We have heard this argument before, most notably in 2014 when, Read more […]
Except for a couple of hiccups, the U.S. stock market has more or less hummed along in an upward trajectory for 2019. Through October, the S&P 500 is up 23%. What is surprising is that the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index® outperformed the benchmark by almost 3%, gaining 26% over the same period. This is Read more […]
Given the current market conditions, the popularity of strategies that rotate between factors or sectors, providing agility in their allocations with the goal of capturing outperformance in changing economic regimes, has increased considerably. One of these strategies is the S&P 500® Sector Rotator Daily RC2 5% Index. The index rotates between the top three sectors Read more […]
While dividend-focused strategies are popular across various regions, not all dividend strategies or dividend indices are constructed the same way or have the same objective. In Brazil, S&P Dow Jones Indices has three different dividend-focused strategies. The S&P Dividend Aristocrats Brasil Index, designed to measure the performance of 30 stocks in the S&P Brazil BMI Read more […]
