While substantial literature exists on dividend investing in developed markets, there is little research on emerging market dividend strategies, in particular for Latin America. S&P Dow Jones Indices surveyed the emerging market dividend payers in 2014 and found that Latin America constituted about 19% of the total global dividend payers.[1] As such, Latin American markets Read more […]
Market gains in the first four months in 2019 more than made up for what it lost in the turbulent last quarter of 2018 as the S&P 500 jumped 18%. Predictably enough, the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index® trailed the broader benchmark (up a “mere” 16% in the first four months), although Low Vol has Read more […]
Global equities have been turbulent recently as a combination of stalled trade negotiations and announcements of tit-for-tat tariffs increased the prospect of a trade war between the U.S. and China. After its historic start to the year, the S&P 500 is down 3.7% so far in May, while many other markets have also faltered month-to-date. Read more […]
The S&P MARC 5% Excess Return (ER) Index started the year firing on all cylinders, with positive returns across all asset classes for the quarter—dimming memories of 2018, when all the underlying indices ended the year in red. Its asset class diversification and weighting strategy helped the index to stay positive throughout the quarter, despite Read more […]
Our Year-End 2018 Canada SPIVA scorecard was released today. In addition to showing that the majority of Canadian active equity managers failed to outperform their benchmarks, the scorecard’s results provide the opportunity to dispel some common misconceptions. Here is a brief summary. 1) Higher volatility does not necessarily result in outperformance by active managers A Read more […]
We recently updated our paper asking Is the Low Volatility Anomaly Universal? The alert reader (and we have no other kind) will have guessed that it is. This is an empirical conclusion, but a theoretical digression might help explain why this is so remarkable. Low volatility strategies explicitly seek to lower the risk of a Read more […]
Inflation in the US averaged 1.5% annually for the last five years with a peak of 2.9%. Despite today’s low and stable inflation numbers, anxiety that the price level will leap up is driving a search for the reasons it seems low. Today’s inflation is a bit lower than the average since 1914 of 3.2% Read more […]
Dividends and stock buybacks are two ways that a company returns capital to its shareholders. Investors can benefit from both, but is there a synergy that can result from combining them? We’ve seen a surge in both buyback value and the number of participating companies in recent years. In 2018, 444 of S&P 500® companies Read more […]
In general, it is a positive sign when a company buy back shares. This means the company believes its stock is undervalued and is confident about its future earnings. In recent years, buybacks have become increasingly popular. With a record number of companies buying back shares, how are these companies are faring? A company can Read more […]
In this blog, the fourth in our introduction to Growth at a Reasonable Price (GARP) strategies, we cover factor exposures, sector composition, and performance attribution. Targeted Factor Exposures Exhibit 1 shows the active exposures (in percentages) of the S&P 500® GARP Index to the five factors used in GARP strategies: three-year sales per share (SPS) Read more […]
