The past two months saw bouts of market volatility, which in turn is causing market participants to refocus on defensive equity strategies. Quality, together with other defensive factors such as low volatility, has a higher degree of downside protection compared with other risk factors like value or momentum. For example, during months in which the Read more […]
Factor investing is growing rapidly — not only are more investors adopting factor strategies, but as investors gain experience, they increase their use of them. This is one of the key findings from our recent Global Factor Investing Study, which is based on face-to-face interviews and discussions with more than 300 institutional and wholesale factor Read more […]
The S&P 500 is down 9.4% month-to-date as of the close on Oct. 29, 2018, and is on pace to record its worst Oct. since 2008 and its sixth worst Oct. based on history since 1928. The other years when the S&P 500 that lost more in Oct. than in Oct. 2018 (so far) happened Read more […]
Many people believe that index-based investing and market beta are synonymous. With the growing popularity of index-based investing, exchange-traded funds and index funds based on market benchmarks such as the S&P BSE SENSEX, S&P BSE 100, and S&P BSE 500 are slowly gaining ground. Investors have been familiarizing themselves with market returns linked to these Read more […]
We’ve recently noted that this month’s market turmoil created a radical reversal of factor returns, poking holes in this year’s momentum bubble. A similar trend has occurred within sectors. During the first nine months of 2018, Consumer Discretionary and Info Tech dominated performance, as seen in Exhibit 1. For the first two weeks of October, Read more […]
The domestic equity market, as measured by the S&P Composite 1500®, ended Q3 2018 with a gain of 10.47%. Over the past 10 years, the S&P Composite 1500 had annualized returns of 12.05%, showing an impressive bullish run since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Perhaps reflecting the market environment, growth-oriented investment styles, such as momentum Read more […]
Yesterday’s decline in the U.S. and global stock markets is striking not simply because of its magnitude but also because it represents a radical reversal of factor returns from the first three quarters of 2018. Readers of our quarterly factor dashboard will recognize this graph, which shows the total return of the S&P 500 and Read more […]
The balance sheet accruals ratio (BSA)[1] is widely used in the investment community to measure earnings quality.[2] This is in part due to accruals being perceived as transient and subject to considerable estimations, manipulations, and potential misrepresentations.[3] BSA is one of the three quality metrics used in the S&P Quality Index Series. We define BSA Read more […]
In a previous blog, we highlighted that carbon-efficient firms tended to be high-quality companies. Moreover, integrated quality + carbon-efficiency hypothetical portfolios tended to have higher risk-adjusted returns and were more carbon efficient than the underlying benchmark. In this blog, we look into the risk and return characteristics of those hypothetical portfolios. This exercise helps us Read more […]
In our earlier blog, “How Important Are Earnings Revisions Signals for Fundamental Factor Strategies in Asia?”, we discussed that the signals from earnings revisions were important for fundamental factor strategies applied across broad markets. They reduced the risk and enhanced the return of the comparable factor portfolios, across the majority of markets. In our research Read more […]
