S&P 500 Value Rebalance: Everything Value Is Growth Again

This post builds on the analysis of the 2022 rebalance, examining the S&P 500 Value Index’s December 15, 2023 rebalance to assess trends and methodologies. High turnover and major sector and risk factor exposure shifts can impact both passive and active strategies, potentially increasing costs and requiring careful risk management.

Too Good to Be True: The Failure of Defensive Managers During Recent Inflationary Shocks

Too Good to Be True: The Failure of Defensive Managers During Recent Inflationary Shocks

The failure of the returns-based approach, along with some interesting dynamics observed in factor contributions, opens an extremely interesting avenue for future analysis. What role did the macroeconomic regime (inflation, top line growth, and interest rates) play in the “defensiveness” of strategies, and what can be done to avoid misclassifying strategies during sharp regime changes?

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The View From the Top: What the Markets Look Like at a Potential Top of the Rate Cycle

The View From the Top: What the Markets Look Like at a Potential Top of the Rate Cycle

Investors’ 2023 New Years’ resolution was apparently to forgive and forget their travails of 2022, as global markets spent 2023 shrugging off the prior years’ anxieties. Excluding emerging East Asia, major global markets have already fully recovered from their losses related to the inflation induced rate cycle kicked off in early 2022.

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Systematic Global Equities: Q4 2023 Update

Systematic Global Equities: Q4 2023 Update

As 2023 drew to a close, the financial markets began to manifest the early signs of a soft-landing scenario, marked by a robust rally in equity markets in the fourth quarter, showcasing double-digit gains. This period was characterized by broadening of market strength, with notable outperformance by small-cap stocks, heavily shorted names, lower-quality companies, unprofitable tech, and a mix of long-duration, meme, cyclical, and value stocks.

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