Tag Archives: Craig Lazzara
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…
- Categories Equities, Factors, S&P 500 & DJIA
- Other Tags
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,…
- Categories Equities, Factors, S&P 500 & DJIA
- Other Tags
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…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
- Other Tags
The Same, Only Different
In the first quarter of 2023, the best performing of the 17 factor indices featured in our monthly factor dashboard was S&P 500® High Beta (up 12.5%), while the worst performer was S&P 500 Momentum (-3.2%). This may seem odd at first blush, since both indices are, in some sense, performance chasers—Momentum in absolute and…
SPIVA and the Challenges of Active Outperformance
What are the three main reasons it’s hard for most active managers to beat their benchmarks? Explore findings from the SPIVA and Persistence Scorecards with S&P DJI’s Craig Lazzara including an allegorical look at what might happen if Craig challenged Michael Jordan to a free-throw shooting contest.
- Categories Equities
- Other Tags
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…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
- Other Tags
Measuring Home Prices
Compared to stock and bond markets, where prices update continuously throughout the trading day, the value of residential real estate is hard to observe; and while one buyer’s shares of stock XYZ are interchangeable with another’s, houses are not similarly fungible. Yet the value of an investor’s house is often a significant component of his…
- Categories Thematics
- Other Tags
Collections of Factors
Traditional investors think of portfolios (whether active or indexed) as collections of stocks. We can equally well think of portfolios as collections of factors—defining factor in the academic sense, as an attribute with which excess returns are thought to be associated. If we’re correct in assessing these attributes, it should be possible to explain portfolio…
- Categories Factors
- Other Tags
Peak Passive and Market Efficiency
With more than $7 trillion tracking the S&P 500 alone, we estimate that index funds now encompass between a quarter and a third of the capitalization of the U.S. equity market. This extraordinary growth must surely rank as one of the most important developments in contemporary financial history. When will it end? For at least…
- Categories Equities
- Other Tags
Active Performance Shortfalls and the Rise of Passive
Why did indexing take root and how has it grown so far so fast? S&P DJI’s Craig Lazzara and Anu Ganti take a closer look at why indexing works, the size of the passive market today, and the historical savings linked to indexing.
- Categories Equities
- Other Tags
- Categories
- Equities
- Other Tags