The contentious debate of active versus passive is perpetual. Over the past 15 years, SPIVA® Scorecard results have reflected on the trends of active fund management vis a vis benchmarks, wherein statistics tilt the balance in favor of indexing. This recurring feature of benchmark outperformance is contributing to the adoption and growth of the passive…
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In 1973, Princeton professor Burton Malkiel wrote the book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, laying out a case against the mutual funds of the time as persistently underperforming market indices. Malkiel recommended[i] that the New York Stock Exchange create a fund that simply bought and held stock in the companies comprising the indices. Somewhat…
The evolution of indexing is one of the most noteworthy trends in modern financial history. The rise of passive investing is the consequence of shortfalls in active performance, as regular readers of our SPIVA reports will recognize. Our recent annual Survey of Indexed Assets shows a surge in S&P 500 indexed assets to $4.6 trillion…
Active funds generally lagged their passive benchmarks in 2019, but the market environment in 2020 has already shifted radically. Volatility has skyrocketed as the S&P 500® and other indices have fallen. Ironically, it is precisely in a time such as this, when absolute returns are hard to come by, that relative returns might be most…
“It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth” -Thomas Fuller The bull market is over. After 11 years of impressive and relatively steady gains, last week the S&P 500® slid into bear market territory, marking the end of the glory of the 2010s and the start of a new regime. Volatility is back with…
Taking a cue from Frank Sinatra, the S&P 500® was riding high in April, shot down in May, and got back on top in June. But the current bull run is feeling its age, and we may be witnessing a change in its stride. Coming into the end of the quarter (all figures are…
The S&P 500® was up 3.93% in April, marking the fourth consecutive month of gains. The YTD gain of 17.51% was the best since 1987 and the fifth-best in the entire history of the index. The index set a new all-time high in April, surpassing the previous high close from Sept. 20, 2018. This completed…
The SPIVA® U.S. Year-End 2018 Scorecard shows a reversal of the relative short-term performance of fixed income funds at the end of 2018 from six months prior. Combined with the interest rates move, this might shed some light on understanding the duration positioning of active funds. We focus on government bond funds for our analysis,…
Contrary to the myth that active managers tend to fare better than their benchmarks during volatile markets, 68.83% of domestic equity funds lagged the S&P Composite 1500® during the one-year period ending Dec. 31, 2018, making 2018 the fourth-worst year for active U.S. equity managers since 2001 (see Exhibit 1). Evidence from the SPIVA U.S….
In our previous blog, we highlighted the contribution to domestic equity market returns by mega-cap stocks in 2017 and the implications for active management. In this blog, we focus our discussion on investment style classification. Specifically, we analyze the impact of the style classification scheme on managers’ performance analysis, such as in the SPIVA® U.S….
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