The new decade of 2020 began in an unprecedented way. There were two distinct phases to the first quarter of the year. The first was characterized by an equity market surging to all-time highs despite concerns about a manufacturing slowdown, geopolitical tensions, and US political uncertainty.
In the last post in this series, we update and expand on our analysis to explore the impact of rising and falling interest rates on the performance of various capitalization tranches. Finally, we now look at the performance of the “Sweet Spot” in different interest rate regimes.
In our previous post, we sought to identify and quantify the investment opportunity or edge within various market capitalization segments. We found that the top 1000 names in the Russell 2500 benchmark constitute a sweet spot across the entire Russell 3000.
The US equity markets exhibit observable biases over time, alternately favoring one group of stocks over others: large cap vs. small cap; value vs. growth; defensive vs. dynamic; sector rotation, etc. We questioned whether there was a longer term benefit to favoring one group of stocks over the others.
