EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Launched in 1995, the S&P Composite 1500 (hereafter the "S&P 1500") serves as a benchmark indicator for U.S. equity market performance, aggregating price movements of S&P 500®, S&P MidCap 400®, and S&P SmallCap 600.
The S&P 1500 also increasingly serves as a basis for constructing portfolios designed to deliver a "market" return at lower cost than those active managers who offer to beat it. We shall examine the S&P 1500 from both perspectives, as well as examining its merits in comparison to popular alternatives. In particular, we observe that:
- The sizeable representation of U.S. companies means tracking U.S. equity market performance may be relevant to investors, globally;
- The S&P 1500 has outperformed the S&P 500, historically;
- Incorporating smaller companies in a U.S. market benchmark provides a more holistic view of the U.S. economy (see Exhibit 7); and
- Compared with other U.S. equity market indices, the S&P 1500 avoids relatively illiquid, lower priced, and lower quality stocks (see Exhibit 1).
MEASURING THE U.S. EQUITY MARKET
U.S. companies represented an average of 49.47% of the S&P Global BMI’s capitalization at each year-end between 1995 and 2019, more than five times the average weight of second-place Japan (9.39%). Given that U.S. companies also accounted for over 50% of the market capitalization in most global industries at the end of 2019, many investors may need to turn to the U.S. in order to obtain certain exposures.
The S&P 1500 is designed for investors seeking to replicate the performance of the U.S. equity market, or benchmark against a representative universe of tradable stocks. The S&P 1500 combines three widely followed indices—the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600—in proportion to their free-float market capitalizations. Hence, the S&P 1500 uses the same inclusion criteria as its three component indices.
