Why Do U.S. Equities and the S&P 500 Matter in South Korea?
S&P DJI’s Sue Lee examines the importance of the S&P 500 in the global equity opportunity set, key diversification and sector composition differences between notable U.S. equity and Korean benchmarks and the challenges faced by active managers in the U.S. and South Korea to outperform this iconic index.
The Dow Hits 50,000!
The Dow Jones Industrial Average® (DJIA) just closed above 50,000 for the first time in its near 130-year history. The Dow®’s latest milestone marks the third time this decade that the U.S. equity barometer first surpassed a 10,000 increment and—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given successive milestones require smaller gains to be achieved—the latest milestone came in record…
2026 Is the Year of the Stock Picker?
Recent market commentary has declared that 2025 was a brutal year for stock picking, with USD 1 trillion pulled out of active equity mutual funds during the year, according to the Investment Company Institute. The year was characterized by sharp double-digit swings for the S&P 500®, and in such environments filled with bouts of volatility,…
Cautioning the Clairvoyant
December is typically when we hear Wall Street strategists announce their forecasts for the S&P 500® for the year ahead, and this year has been no exception: 2026 forecasts have ranged from a relatively bearish 7,100 from Bank of America to a bullish 8,000 from Deutsche Bank. But how accurate have these forecasts been in…
Animal Spirits or Anxiety?
Big Tech and the strength of the Magnificent 7 stocks have powered the S&P 500® to 36 all-time closing highs through the end of October. Amid the euphoria, nervousness about the AI boom1 has sent jitters through the market, most recently with SoftBank’s sale of its stake in Nvidia. The extreme level of mega-cap dominance…
Skewing Success
The results from our SPIVA® U.S. Mid-Year 2025 Scorecard demonstrate a relatively better start to the year for active managers, with 54% of U.S. large-cap funds underperforming the S&P 500®, slightly better than the 65% reported in 2024. However, Exhibit 1 shows that over the more than 24-year history of our SPIVA U.S. Scorecard, majority…
Indicization Nation
To indicize means to provide, in passive form, a strategy formerly available only via active management. Until the early 1970s, there were no index funds; all assets were managed actively. The shift of assets from active to passive management is one of the most important trends in modern financial history. Our recent Annual Survey of…
Exploring Tokenization: A New Era for Traditional Assets
In July 2025, S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) announced its entry into the tokenization space1 via a strategic collaboration with Centrifuge, a decentralized infrastructure provider. The collaboration marks the first time that S&P DJI has licensed index data for the creation of a digital token and, in doing so, will bring the S&P 500®…
Surveying U.S. Markets: Sectors, Geopolitics and Index-Based Strategies
How do global investors use the S&P 500 to better understand the performance and potential opportunity set in U.S. equity markets? S&P DJI’s Tim Edwards joins GCMA’s Michael Grifferty for a closer look at the role of the S&P 500 ecosystem in the global economy and how market participants are using the index icon to…
Quarterly Changes May Not Be Constant
The S&P 500®, commonly referred to as The 500™, underwent its latest quarterly update—commonly known as rebalances—at the end of last week. S&P 500 rebalances take place after the close of the third Friday of the quarter-ending month and can involve constituent changes (additions and deletions) as well as updates to company characteristics, such as…
