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.
Xponance Diverse & Emerging Manager CEO Roundtable
In December 2023 Tina Byles Williams, Founder, CEO and CIO of Xponance, hosted 24 CEOs from among the firm’s currently funded sub-advisors to participate in a roundtable discussion on the most pertinent challenges to emerging and diverse investment management companies.
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?
U.S. Fixed Income: Q4 2023 Update
The 4th quarter Treasury and spread rally rescued the broad fixed income market from another year of negative or barely positive (depending on sector) returns. In traditional bond market fashion, however, we find much to worry about with stretched valuations in most of the spread sectors and an uncertain path forward for the economy and interest rates.
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.
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.