All North America articles
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White papersThe 20-Year Bond in a Brave New World
The US Government has responded to COVID-19 in unprecedented ways to produce a huge and rapid fiscal policy response. To fund this policy, the Treasury announced that it will issue over $800 billion in Treasury securities over the next three months. Including issuance completed in April, the issuance number rises to over $1 trillion. That is a massive issuance schedule. Here is what is upcoming.
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Taking the Bite Out of High Yield’s Tail Risk
A new buyer has arrived on the scene of U.S. high yield markets, and it happens to be the biggest buyer of them all: the U.S. Federal Reserve.
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Fixed Income: Bringing the Economy Back from Life Support
What kind of recession will this be, and what kind of recovery will follow? Sonal Desai CIO - Fixed Income covers the difficult trade-offs in the US.
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Investment Grade Credit: Open For Business
The new-issue market remains available to investment-grade corporate credit, thanks to the swift and sizable monetary support from the Federal Reserve.
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Blog | Russell 1000 leads Russell 2000 in stampede to safety
The outperformance of US large caps over their small-cap peers that began last June persisted through the March 2020 turmoil, underpinned by the extreme investor run for safer ground. The Russell 1000 fell 20.2% in Q1 2020, versus a drop of 30.6% for the Russell 2000. While both indexes enjoyed sharp rebounds in late March, only the Russell 1000 is back in positive territory for the longer term (up 4.9% since January last year). The Russell 2000 remains deeply in the red (down 12.9% for the same period).
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Unique Disruptions, Exceptional Measures
As we argued in our previous piece detailing the Fed’s 100bps cut and increased asset purchases, although the Fed had unloaded countless rounds of ammunition, additional firepower remained.
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29 Days Later
On February 19th, the S&P 500® closed at an all-time high of 3386; last night, exactly one month later it closed at 2409, a 29% decline from the high. Let’s take a moment to reflect on what’s happened over the last month.
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The Importance of Asset Class Diversification: A Performance Analysis of the S&P MARC 5% Index
Recent selloffs in the equity markets and a significant rise in volatility signal an end to the 11-year bull market (Bye Bye Bull Market: Reaction to Coronavirus). While most broad market domestic equity indices have declined, the performance of the S&P MARC 5% Index (ER) has held up (1.84%). The answer to its resiliency lies in its index construction, which attempts to maximize diversification benefits.
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With VIX Above 80, Expect 5% Daily Swings in the S&P 500
Volatility – it is sometimes said – takes the elevator up but takes the stairs down. Like seismic activity, volatility can rise precipitously, but tends to decay more slowly; aftershocks and tremors continue to roil markets after any major repricing occurs. The practical consequence is that, once the markets become volatile, they tend to remain so for some time. For the short term at least, outsized daily moves will be the new normal.
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The Virtue of Protection
It remains to be seen what the full economic impact of the COVID-19 virus will be, but it is already clear that no equity market has escaped unscathed. (In fact, most of them have been scathed rather badly.) The Canadian equity market was humming along in 2020 through February 20, 2020, with the S&P/TSX Composite climbing 5.5% in almost two months.
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Insights: Tipping the scales of corporate profitability with gender-diverse boards
Published research links board diversity to increased corporate profitability, but a key question for investors is how much diversity is required to make a financially material difference to companies.
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Blog | Risk and opportunity on the horizon for US small cap investors
While the 2020 picture looks promising for US small-cap equities, according to market experts at FTSE Russell and Cboe, a number of risks still lurk on the horizon for investors.
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Blog | Monsters, mud and misunderstanding
At the Inside ETFs industry confab in late January, David Nadig of #ETFTrends led a lightning round of 10 questions in 20 minutes for FTSE Russell executives Jayni Kosoff, head of fixed income strategy & business development and Rolf Agather, director of North America research. With the goal of generating an “intense amount of information in a short period of time,” Nadig’s questions were designed to make #InsideETFs industry conference goers think about how market indexes, data and analytics—spanning equity and fixed income—fit into the ETF industry.
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The pros and cons of daily and monthly index rebalancing: Canada
Is it better for a bond index to be able to change every day, or only every month?
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Investment Perspectives - Building smarter allocations to U.S. growth equities
U.S. equity markets offer global investors an essential window of access to developed market economic growth. Lower global risk premiums are forcing investors to look more actively for relative value opportunities within their strategic allocations. High secular growth opportunities within the U.S. market can improve the resiliency ...
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Blog | Are there active bets hidden in your index?
As the bull market has marched on in 2019, rising markets have continued to lift US stocks to new highs. Indexes are generally the metric for these milestones, which can at times raise questions about uneven performance—particularly when an index reaches an all-time high while another comparable index doesn’t. But comparisons such as these lose sight of the very purpose of a passive index, which is to stay true to its stated objectives rather than outperform them.
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White papers
Trump’s Trade Triumphs May Not Settle Markets for Long
Trade truce does not necessarily mean trade peace. Despite recent agreements by the U.S. with China and its North American partners, we’re still a long way away from what was recently considered normal, and the risk remains all-too clear at this week’s Davos “After-Party.”
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SPIVA U.S. Mid-Year 2019
How do active managers stack up against their benchmarks over short and long time periods.
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Does Past Performance Matter? The Persistence Scorecard
The S&P Persistence Scorecard attempts to distinguish a manager’s luck from skill. One key measure of successful active management lies in the ability of a manager to outperform his peers consistently.
