A CRITICAL DISTINCTION TO BE MADE When the pandemic began, many investors feared widespread dividend cuts. However, while some companies did cut or suspended their dividends, the damage was largely confined to the pandemic’s early stages. Once the economy began to stabilize, so did dividends. By the end of 2020, approximately three times as many…
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The S&P 500® Dividend Aristocrats® is an index comprising companies in the S&P 500 that have increased their annual cash payments for at least 25 years in a row. Dividends are a part of their culture and public appeal (income), as they broadly highlight their increases. In general, their increases are smaller but still constant,…
Dividends play a vital role in many investors’ approach to the market, although there is more than one way to approach dividends. Some investors are most concerned with dividend yield per se, while others are more sensitive to the growth of dividends over time. Both approaches, of course, can be readily indicized. Within the U.S….
In January 2019, we highlighted several indices designed to reduce the impact of large equity market drawdowns. Here we analyze the same suite of indices divided across three broad categories: defensive equity, multi-asset, and volatility. This analysis simply reviews performance since the S&P 500®’s high on Feb. 19, 2020, through the close on Friday, March…
One of the most significant characteristics of the post-financial crisis world has been the global persistence of low, or even negative, interest rates. The entire U.S. Treasury curve yielded below 1% for the first time in history on March 9, 2020, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, before the long end reverted recently on…
How do the personalities of two dividend index portfolios look when reviewed under the “Factor Lens”? Using the Optimal Asset Management’s Factor Allocator tool, let’s review two strategies – S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats and the S&P 500 High Dividend Index. We can identify the average factor exposures of each strategy since January 1995 by viewing…
One of the common misconceptions in finance is that companies from the Information Technology (Tech) sector do not pay dividends. While this may have been the trend a long time ago, this has certainly not been the trend over the past 10 years. Over the past 10 years, within the Tech sector of the S&P…
Summary With Q3’s earnings season substantially complete, 2019 earnings for S&P 500 companies are expected to decline on a year-over-year basis. After several strong quarters last year, the first three quarters this year have seen marked earnings deceleration. Providing 1/3 of historical S&P 500 total returns, dividends could become important when the market may be…
Dividends and stock buybacks are two ways that a company returns capital to its shareholders. Investors can benefit from both, but is there a synergy that can result from combining them? We’ve seen a surge in both buyback value and the number of participating companies in recent years. In 2018, 444 of S&P 500® companies…
Today we examine the impact of the members of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Class of 2019 on the index’s factor risk and sector composition. In our previous blog, we introduced these new constituents and discussed their quality ranking. Risk decomposition of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats using Axioma’s US Fundamental Equity Risk Model MH4…
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