Tag Archives: institutional investor
Measuring Direct Lending: Building Transparency in Private Credit Markets
Direct Lending Has Become a Core Segment of Private Credit Private credit has expanded in recent years, with the market reaching an estimated USD 2.28 trillion at year-end 2025 and projected to grow to approximately USD 4.5 trillion by 2030.1 Within this expansion, direct lending has emerged as the dominant strategy, reshaping how companies access…
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The Takaichi Trade: How Dispersion Shaped Japanese Active Funds’ Fortunes
Amid a strong year for global equities in 2025, the latest SPIVA® Japan Scorecard showed that most active funds in Japan struggled to outperform their assigned benchmarks. An interesting finding in the report was the striking difference in relative performance between actively managed Japanese Large-Cap funds and Japanese Mid-/Small-Cap funds. Just 49% of Japanese Large-Cap…
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Unicorns at the Gate: How Mega IPOs Could Reshape Global and Thematic Indices
Big unicorns are outside the door waiting to join the public markets party. Recently, it has been reported that SpaceX,1 OpenAI2 and Anthropic3 are preparing for their initial public offering (IPO) in the near future. This has drawn attention not just for the size of these firms but for the impact they would have on…
Spot the Difference
From a U.S. equities perspective, the first month of 2026 started on a different trajectory compared to years past. S&P 500® performance trailed much of the rest of the world (as measured by the S&P World Ex-U.S. Index), and within the U.S., the performance of the S&P 500 Information Technology (“U.S. Tech”) ranked in the…
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Exploring an Index-Based Path to Leveraged Loans
What’s the role of indices in the fast-growing leveraged loans market? S&P DJI’s Frans Scheepers and State Street Investment Management’s Marcel Benjamin explore how indexing works for leveraged loans and take a closer look at the S&P USD Select Leveraged Loan Index.
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Fashionably Late Cycle: The S&P 500 Market Leaders Index
The late-cycle economy is defined as the final phase of the macroeconomic cycle when economic activity hits its peak. The period is characterized by high but slowing growth, rising inflation that may affect profit generation, a tight labor market and volatility in interest rates. Given these conditions, many market participants are considering how best to…
- Categories Factors
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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…
- Categories Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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- Equities, S&P 500 & DJIA
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Rallies, Records and Relentless Restlessness: A Tale of Markets in 2025
As 2025 draws to a close, U.S. large caps boast impressive gains: after a rocky start that saw a 19% drawdown, the S&P 500® is up 18% including dividends, as of Dec. 12, significantly above its annualized total return of 10.8% since inception in 1957. The U.S. bellwether also recorded 37 all-time highs this year….
- Categories Equities
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Factors for All Markets
Recently, much of the financial media has been occupied with discussing the potential of a bubble in markets. Some have compared the current sentiment to the “animal spirits” of the late 1990s.1 Proponents of this view cite stretched valuations, retail-driven speculation and the circularity of transactions as evidence to support their claims. Whether or not…
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The S&P USD Select Leveraged Loan Index: A Comprehensive Approach to the Leveraged Loan Market
The S&P USD Select Leveraged Loan Index is a new entrant in the leveraged loan landscape, developed to fill a critical gap in existing liquid leveraged loan index offerings that typically focus on the largest loans by market capitalization. This innovative index encompasses all USD-denominated fully funded term loans with a minimum facility size of…
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