Given the trends that had been lasting for years, it had to happen sooner or later: the S&P 500 index now includes three companies with weights above (or very close to) 7%, and its top eight constituents together represent 35% of total. This is possibly the biggest threat on active management.
The evolution of the US market’s broad index as a result of market cap variations will soon pose a serious problem to portfolio managers. In UCITS funds, it is already impossible to reach a significant overweight on Apple, Microsoft or Nvidia without breaking the 5/10/40 rule.
However, there is something going on, that we see as an even more serious issue: with some of these megacaps living their own life in a way relatively disconnected from their fundamentals, as their deep cash pockets or their notoriety can offset many adverse developments, even active managers can’t afford ignoring them completely. Even if you find it unattractive, not holding a 7% constituent of your benchmark at all is a big risk, but mitigating that risk means allocating 4 or 5% of the assets to that undesired position. And if you happen to be positive on the stock, just reaching the point where the overweight stance will start takes a huge toll on your assets, to the detriment of the portfolio’s active share. In other words, the distorted structure of the index reduces active managers’ ability to do their job and maintain an active exposure as high as they would normally do. Ours actually declined from 82% a few years ago to about 74% now.
There doesn’t seem to be many options for S&P Dow Jones Indices to resolve this issue, which already effected narrower indices with a few dominant companies, but remains unprecedented in the world’s largest economy. Regulators may unwittingly contribute, if they keep digging into the Magnificent Seven’s alleged anticompetitive practices, and eventually go as far as breaking some of them up. This however remains a remote perspective, and for the moment, active portfolio managers will keep operating under constraints.
HG – June 18, 2024