Tag Archives: index design
Why Cap Weighting?
Journalists and others occasionally offer comparisons of capitalization-weighted index funds with other weighting schemes. Some of these efforts are more useful than others, but none, in my experience, identify the question that cap-weighted indices were initially designed to answer, and which accounts for their enduring economic significance. That question is, simply put: What is the…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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Recalled to Life: The S&P SmallCap 600’s Persistent Outperformance after the Russell Reconstitution
S&P DJI’s paper, A Tale of Two Benchmarks (first published in in 2009 and later updated in 2015 and 2019), showed that the S&P SmallCap 600® has structurally outperformed the Russell 2000, primarily benefiting from S&P DJI’s index inclusion criteria for profitability, liquidity, and public float. The paper also delves deeper into several secondary attribution…
- Categories Equities
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Low Volatility: Success or Failure?
One of the consequences of May’s shift in leadership of the U.S. equity market from defensive to cyclical sectors has been the underperformance of most (if not all) low volatility strategies. Does this mean, as some commentators have suggested (e.g. see http://www.indexuniverse.com/hot-topics/18860-when-low-volatilitty-bites-back.html?showall=&fullart=1&start=4), that low volatility strategies “failed?” Making a judgment of success or failure, about…
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