Tag Archives: Passive
Headwinds on the Active Horizon
Active managers’ performance was disappointing in 2020, despite the market’s heightened volatility. As the market continues to march upward in 2021, it’s natural to wonder if current conditions are favorable for stock pickers. We expect active managers’ difficulties to persist. We can think of volatility in terms of its components: dispersion and correlation. Active managers…
- Categories S&P 500 & DJIA
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Risk-Adjusted SPIVA Year-End 2020 Scorecard: No Evidence to Support Superior Risk Management Skills of Active Managers
Modern Portfolio Theory tells us that higher returns tend to be associated with higher risk. Active managers tend to boast about their risk management skills and claim that they can generate higher returns than passive funds on a risk-adjusted basis. The Risk-Adjusted SPIVA® Scorecard assesses the risk-adjusted returns of actively managed funds against their benchmarks…
- Categories Equities
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Persistence
Lyndon Baines Johnson became President of the United States at a moment of national trauma, and left office at a time of tremendous political division. Despite a landslide electoral victory in 1964 and notable legislative achievements, his was not a happy presidency. LBJ observed, in fact, that “being President is like being a jackass in…
- Categories S&P 500 & DJIA
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Can Top-Performing Funds Stay on Top over Time?
Many market participants attempt to identify future top-performing funds using managers’ track records. This practice implicitly assumes that managers’ successful track records reflect skill and that their superior performance will be repeated in the future. Since genuine skill is likely to persist, one key measure of active management skill is the consistency of a fund’s…
- Categories Equities
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Making Sense of the Active Manager’s Conundrum
Why are the market environments most conducive to generating positive absolute returns the least conducive to producing positive relative returns? Explore the active manager’s conundrum with S&P DJI’s Craig Lazzara and Anu Ganti.
The Progression of Passive
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…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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Is Volatility an Investor’s Friend or Enemy?
Explore how high volatility and high dispersion can impact passive and active managers’ performance with S&P DJI’s Craig Lazzara. Get the latest Dispersion, Volatility, & Correlation dashboard: https://spdji.com/documents/commentary/dashboard-dispersion-2020-03.pdf
- Categories Equities
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Stock Pickers: Hope Springs Eternal
The Wall Street Journal recently quoted several active managers who claim that “conditions for stock picking are improving”. Their rationale is that declining correlations among stocks in the S&P 500 have made it easier for active managers to select stocks based on fundamental analysis. We have heard this argument before, most notably in 2014 when,…
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2019 Mid-Year Persistence Scorecard – Key Highlights
When it comes to investing, market participants often consider past performance to be indicative of future results. The same goes for fund selection. Notwithstanding the evidence showing that most active managers in most regions typically underperformed their benchmarks, consistently beating peers is one way to differentiate a manager’s luck from skill. Here are a few…
- Categories Strategy
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Raising the Bar in Small Caps
As a leading index provider with clients and customers around the world, S&P Dow Jones Indices regularly launches new indices. Just like our children, we try to love them all equally. Every now and then, however, a particularly exciting new index comes along. Last week, our global equities group launched a potentially important new benchmark…