Global Equity Markets – US versus Rest of the World
Technology has been one of the best performing sectors in equity markets over the last 10 years, accounting for a significant portion of broader equity market performance. This phenomenon has been felt disproportionately in the US and has been backed by a strong relative earnings trend. Source: BCA The increasing weight of Technology in the US, driven by earnings and upward rerating has been at the forefront of the trend for US equities and has pushed US performance versus the Rest of the World (RoW). Source: BCA We have gone back to test this phenomenon and to try to understand how much of a role momentum has played. Momentum, at its simplest expression, is the practice of picking winners by buying the winners. In the below-described test, we find that any combination of the largest listed US Tech companies of five years ago would have outperformed the market in the last five years. We took the largest 10 tech names from the S&P 500 from 5 years ago and used a Monte Carlo simulation (which generates a large number of random results subject to constraints) using 2,000 combinations of weights for the basket (with a 5-15% boundary restriction on individual [...]