Tag Archives: Skill vs. Luck
Chasing Performance
“…sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – The White Queen, Through the Looking Glass Should an asset owner rely on historical performance data to select managers? The efficacy of doing so depends on the answers to three questions: What fraction of the manager universe is truly gifted? How gifted are…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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- Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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Active Success: Still Elusive
Anyone even vaguely conversant with our SPIVA® Scorecards will realize that most active managers underperform passive benchmarks most of the time. This result is robust across geographies and across time, and is reflected in our recently issued mid-year 2023 report for the U.S. market. Although the scorecard covers 39 categories of equity and fixed income…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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- Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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Active or Agnostic?
In order to generate value for his clients, an active investment manager must deviate from a passive benchmark—by choosing sectors, or styles, or individual stocks that the manager predicts will outperform. The manager’s value is dependent on the accuracy of his predictions; the better he is at identifying the best sectors, or styles, or stocks,…
- Categories Equities, Factors, S&P 500 & DJIA
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Persistently Disappointing
If you’ve ever read a prospectus (or, for that matter, an S&P DJI research report), you know that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” At one level, if you understand that, you understand the most important thing about S&P DJI’s Persistence Scorecards. For the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Canada (with Australia coming…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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SPIVA and the Challenges of Active Outperformance
What are the three main reasons it’s hard for most active managers to beat their benchmarks? Explore findings from the SPIVA and Persistence Scorecards with S&P DJI’s Craig Lazzara including an allegorical look at what might happen if Craig challenged Michael Jordan to a free-throw shooting contest.
- Categories Equities
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Unwisely Concentrated
Anyone familiar with our SPIVA Scorecards will recognize that most active managers fail most of the time. Anyone familiar with active managers will recognize that they can be quite creative in proposing both excuses and remedies for this historical record. One of their most persistent suggestions, in fact, is that active management simply isn’t active…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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Shooting Hoops with Michael Jordan: An Allegory
I am not a particularly good athlete, and perhaps the sport at which I am most inept is basketball. Despite that, let’s assume that I somehow challenge Michael Jordan, arguably the best player in the history of the game, to a free throw shooting contest. What are my chances of success? (Stay with me, I…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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