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Tag Archives: S&P 500 Low Volatility

Feb 27, 2023

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…

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Jan 30, 2023

What Performance Reversals Suggest

Investment results in 2022 were distinctly different from those of the recent past. The S&P 500®, which had doubled in the three years between 2019 and 2021, fell by more than 18% last year, and Exhibit 1 shows that there were regime shifts among factor indices as well. The dominance of Value over Growth in…

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Nov 24, 2022

How Low Volatility Works in Challenging Markets

When does low volatility tend to outperform and why? S&P DJI’s Craig Lazzara and Invesco’s Nick Kalivas take a closer look at low vol performance in periods of rising rates and inflation, and explore what happens to risk/return when low vol is combined with other factors.

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Nov 23, 2022

Understanding the Low Volatility Anomaly

Take a deep dive into the low volatility anomaly as S&P DJI’s Craig Lazzara explains what the anomaly is, when and why it outperforms, and the role of dispersion in identifying potential opportunities.

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Nov 21, 2022

A Stalwart Delivers

U.S. equities struggled again in the past three months. The last rebalance for the S&P 500® Low Volatility Index was in August 2022 and the S&P 500 has since declined 7.0%. The S&P 500 Low Volatility Index, which has historically moderated the performance of the benchmark, lost 5.1% in the same period. For the entirety…

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Nov 10, 2021

An Efficient, Rules-Based Approach to Factor Rotation

Explore how the design of the S&P 500 Factor Rotator Daily RC2 7% Index is helping democratize access to factor investing, providing a simple, rules-based blueprint for building dynamic factor strategies.

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Apr 5, 2021

Happy Birthday to Low Vol and High Beta!

On April 4, 2011, S&P DJI launched two strategy indices, the S&P 500® Low Volatility Index and the S&P 500 High Beta Index. Ten years of live history let us compare how the two indices actually performed versus their pre-launch back-tests. Many investors take back-tested history with an understandable grain of salt. But even live…

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Sep 17, 2020

Comparing Defensive Factors During the Last 3 Bear Markets

In the factor world of investing, Low Volatility and Quality have been commonly referred to as defensive factors.  The following is an examination of the performance of the S&P 500 Quality Index and the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index compared to the S&P 500 during the last 3 equity bear markets.  The graphs and data…

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Aug 21, 2020

A Stable Regime

In recent days the S&P 500 reached multiple new highs, despite the still-uncertain nature of the economy’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Year to date through Aug. 20, 2020, the S&P 500 is up 6% while the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index is down 6%. Market volatility remains high, as evidenced by the charts in…

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Jul 27, 2020

Observing a Regime Change

In politics, “regime change” denotes the replacement of one governmental structure with another; in economics, we use the same term to indicate a shift in the interactions of various parts of the economic or financial system. Political regime changes are easy to identify (after all, a military coup is hard to miss).  Defining when an…

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