Frankfurt: Smart Risk, Stronger Alpha - Spring 2026

The first quarter of 2026 tested a foundational assumption of global equity investing: that geographic diversification provides meaningful protection when markets come under stress. It did not. The March sell-off spilled across asset classes and borders indiscriminately. The AI-driven repricing that preceded it hit companies well beyond the US technology sector. And the Strait of Hormuz disruption revealed that the most exposed portfolios were not necessarily those with the highest visible emerging-market weights - they were those with the deepest hidden economic ties to Gulf supply chains, regardless of where their holdings were domiciled.

The Spring 2026 edition of Smart Risk, Stronger Alpha takes these events as its starting point. Across Frankfurt, Geneva and Paris, this series will explore a single, practical question: what does it actually mean to be globally diversified in a world where economic gravity no longer respects political borders? Through the lens of MSCI's new Global Economic Regions Equity Factor Model - combined with the factor analytics, crowding signals, and portfolio construction tools that practitioners rely on daily -  attendees will work through a concrete use case showing how economic region exposure can be measured, attributed, and ultimately managed in live portfolios. The series closes with an exclusive preview of MSCI's Value Chain Intelligence dataset, offering a first look at how issuer-level supply chain mapping extends this analysis to its natural frontier.

Building on the Winter edition's focus on regime-aware risk management, the Spring series goes further: from diagnosing how risks behave, to reshaping how portfolios are built.

What to expect

Sessions are designed to be research-led and immediately applicable, combining MSCI's latest empirical work with live portfolio use cases relevant to systematic and fundamental equity investors alike:

• A deep dive into the macro and market forces shaping equity portfolios in 2026 - from geopolitical shock waves and oil supply disruption to the AI-driven repricing of growth and profitability factors at their fastest pace on record
• A practical demonstration of how the MSCI Global Economic Regions Equity Factor Model reframes portfolio analysis: identifying which holdings carry concentrated economic exposure to regions that country-of-domicile alone would obscure
• Live attribution and portfolio construction walkthroughs showing how economic region awareness would have changed portfolio outcomes across the tariff shock and the AI sell-off - and how it shapes construction going forward using MSCI's optimizer and factor tools
• A first look at MSCI's Value Chain Intelligence dataset, exploring how issuer-to-issuer supply chain mapping adds a granular layer of insight to the economic region framework -and what questions it opens up for investors assessing geopolitical and physical risk at the company level

Why attend

Whether you manage systematic strategies, run a fundamentally driven equity book, or sit at the intersection of both, this edition of Smart Risk, Stronger Alpha is designed to challenge how you think about portfolio diversification and where risk actually resides:

• Gain a grounded, evidence-based perspective on why standard geographic diversification failed in Q1 2026 — and what a more structurally rigorous alternative looks like in practice
• See MSCI's newest equity risk modelling capabilities applied to real market events, with a direct line from research insight to portfolio decision
• Engage with the supply chain intelligence frontier before it reaches general availability — and begin thinking about the questions it will allow you to answer
• Exchange views in a focused, practitioner-oriented setting with peers navigating the same challenges of alpha generation in a world of compressed cross-asset correlations and increasingly fragile diversification assumptions

Above all, the series aims to advance a practical discipline: measuring the risks you cannot see at face value, so that the alpha you seek is built on foundations that hold.