BY TOM WICKENDEN
Republished from Betashares.com.au
Passive broad market ETFs offer investors a wealth of benefits and are often used as ‘set-and-forget’ core exposures. Despite this, investors still have an onus to monitor their investments to manage portfolios from a risk perspective. For example, the diversification benefits of broad market indices are well-known, as they generally invest in a large universe of stocks rather than a selected few. However, market cap weighting does not necessarily optimise diversification or minimise stock-specific risk.
Currently, the US market, as measured by the weight of the top 5 companies in the S&P 500 Index, is experiencing its highest levels of concentration in over 50 years. For investors with exposure to the market capitalisation-weighted S&P 500, this poses a threat to portfolio diversification, particularly since these top 5 names – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and Google, belong to related sectors. However, it may also present an opportunity.
The S&P 500 Equal Weight Index is the equal-weight version of the widely used S&P 500. The index includes the same constituents as the market capitalisation-weighted S&P 500, but each company in the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index is allocated a fixed weight at each quarterly rebalance – being 0.2% of the index total – helping to ensure greater diversification across the top 500 US companies.
Historically, concentration in the US market has been mean-reverting, and when concentration has been high and subsiding the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index has tended to experience its greatest outperformance compared to its market capitalisation-weighted counterpart. For example, between August 2020 and December 2022, the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index outperformed the market capitalisation-weighted S&P 500 Index by 16% as top 5 concentration fell from 24% to 19%.
Equal weight – much more than a short-term solution
However, the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index should not be considered a tactical trading idea, but a potential long term US equity core allocation. Since the index’s inception in December 2002, the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index has outperformed the S&P 500 Index by 1.1% p.a. That said, over the shorter run, the equal-weighted index has gone through periods of underperformance, when larger cap stocks had periods of outperformance.
Whilst not targeting any specific investment factor, the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index’s longer-term outperformance can be attributed to 4 key drivers:
1. Rebalancing impact:
Each quarter, as stocks are rebalanced to 0.2%, those that have risen in value are sold and stocks that have fallen in value are bought. This systematic “buy low sell high” rebalancing strategy can add value over time.
2. Increased diversification/lower concentration.
Diversification is often said to be the only ‘free lunch’ in investing. This alone could make an equal weight strategy a compelling consideration as a longer-term investment approach in US equities.
3. Size impact:
The size premium refers to empirical evidence that smaller companies have on average tended to offer greater growth potential compared to larger cap stocks over the long run.
4. Stock return skew:
Historically, in equity markets, the average stock return has tended to be higher than the median stock return. Given that the average return is higher than the median return, it means that more than half the stocks deliver a return below the average. Equal weight indices typically hold a higher weight in a larger number of stocks compared to the equivalent market capitalisation index resulting in a higher probability of an overweight position in the smaller subset of stocks with outsized returns.
Perfect timing? US investors buy in as market breadth improves
Over the past three years, as concentration has increased in the market capitalisation-weighted S&P 500, we have seen increased inflows into the largest US-based S&P 500 Equal Weight Index-tracking ETF. Investors seem to be increasingly considering the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index as a potential complement for, or alternative to, the market capitalisation-weighted S&P 500 Index.
The most recent surge in flows has come at a time when US market breadth is starting to improve. From 1 January 2023 to 31 May 2023, just 10 “tech stocks” contributed more than 100% of the S&P 500 Index’s gains, with the remaining 490 companies detracting from overall performance. However, since 1 June 2023 (as of 17 August 2023), the market rally has broadened, with only four of the top 10 contributors being “tech stocks”, and, more importantly, the other 490 companies contributing to over 60% of the total returns for the S&P 500 Index, as visualised below. This increased breadth could help to position an equal-weighted strategy for strong outperformance potential compared to a market cap-weighted strategy.
Investors are contemplating what lies ahead for US equities, with some predicting a market pullback led by the same mega-cap names that have driven most of this year’s rally, while others are calling for market breadth to continue improving. We believe that both of these scenarios make it an appropriate time to consider the benefits of allocating to the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index from both a risk perspective and as long-term core portfolio allocation.
BetaShares is a leading Australian fund manager specialising in exchange traded funds (ETFs) and other Funds traded on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Since launching their first ETF more than a decade ago, BetaShares has grown to become one of Australia’s largest managers of ETFs.
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