Quotes About S&P 500

Low-volatility funds, which tend to smooth out performance, have been especially popular since the financial crisis. The PowerShares S&P 500 Low Volatility Fund is the oldest, begun in 2011.

Why do investors fail to realize that money placed in a mutual fund that tries to pick "out-performing stocks" is unlikely to yield a better return than money invested in the S&P 500? If fund managers and investment advisers are so good at picking stocks, why are they risking your money rather than their own? Some

Then came Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the bottom simply fell out. A record-cracking 600 million shares were traded on the Big Board that day, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 508 points—a 22.6 percent fall, more than twice the damage inflicted on the worst day of the historic 1929 crash. The S&P 500 dropped almost as far, just as fast.

The S&P 500 Index originally contained exactly 425 industrial, 25 rail, and 50 utility firms, but these groupings were abandoned in 1988 in order to maintain, as Standard & Poor's claimed, an index that included "500 leading companies in leading industries of the economy.

CVS Corporation, which in 1957 entered the S&P 500 Index as Melville Shoe Corp.,

If you rank the top 50 one-day moves in the S&P 500, a fair number of those happened within the last five or 10 years. That tells you that we're in a different, riskier market now.

Investors who focus on currencies, bonds, and stock markets generally assume a normal distribution of price changes: values jiggle up and down, but extreme moves are unusual. Of course, extreme moves are possible, as financial crashes show. But between 1985 and 2015, the S&P 500 stock index budged less than 3 percent from its starting point on 7,663 out of 7,817 days; in other words, for fully 98 percent of the time, the market is remarkably stable.

Consumer staples usually underperform the S&P 500 during bull markets and outperform it during bear markets.

"Now you can trade the S&P 500 Index in real time" was the slogan in the newspapers for the first ETF. What kind of nut would do that?

For the 20-year period from December 31, 1993, to December 31, 2013, the S&P 500 returned 9.2% annually, but the average mutual fund investor averaged just over 2.5%, barely beating inflation.

I think over any period of time, especially if you don't use leverage, it is difficult to continually beat the S&P 500.

Overall, a portfolio of the "good to great" companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

I would rather buy Indian equities than the S&P 500.

Percentage of Actively Managed Mutual Funds Outperformed by the S&P 500 Index (Periods through June 30, 2012) Sources: Lipper and The Vanguard Group.

Average Annual Returns of Actively Managed Mutual Funds Compared with S&P 500 20 years, Ending June 30, 2012 Sources: Lipper, Wilshire, and The Vanguard Group. S&P 500 Index Fund 8.34% Average Active Equity Mutual Funda 7.00% Shortfall +1.34%

Burton Malkiel, professor of economics, Princeton University and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street: "Through the past thirty years more than two-thirds of professional portfolio managers have been outperformed by the unmanaged S&P 500 Index.

If you're indexing to the S&P 500, you're buying the most expensive names in the market.

Index funds generally buy and hold all the securities within a particular index in a market cap—weighted fashion. Thus while an S&P 500 Index fund would own all five hundred stocks that comprise the index, it would not own an equal amount of each of the five hundred stocks. The largest holding might, for example, be 5 percent of the entire portfolio. There

Standard & Poor's Dow Jones Indices published a statistical analysis in 2016 detailing the dismal record of "active" portfolio managers: As is typically the case, about two-thirds of active large-capitalization managers underperformed the S&P 500 large-cap index during 2015. Nor

September 2001 turned out to be an unusually bad time to sell stocks: By New Year's Day 2002, little more than three months after the post-9/11 low reached on Sept. 21, the S&P 500 had gained close to 20 percent.

Next, divide free cash flow by sales (or revenues), which tells you what proportion of each dollar in revenue the firm is able to convert into excess profits. If a firm's free cash flow as a percentage of sales is around 5 percent or better, you've found a cash machine—as of mid-2003, only one-half of the S&P 500 pass this test. Strong free cash flow is an excellent sign that a firm has an economic moat.