Throughout the third quarter, investors shifted attention to risks from inflation, tapering and potential interest-rate rises. We analyze global equities and the rotation toward defensive factors.

We expand on our analysis of industry momentum to assess the persistence of a premium across different regions and the ability of a rules-based strategy to help investors as they seek to capture this premium.

For investors who use yield strategies to generate income, a steady stream of dividend payments is important. But with more companies using buybacks as a way to redistribute profits, investors may want to consider a more holistic view of income.

To what extent has climate risk been priced into equity markets? How can we model such risks as the world moves toward net-zero targets? We show how climate has increased in importance in the last two years, with potential long-term implications for understanding equity markets.

Factor investing typically involves both security selection and alternative weighting based on security-level factor exposure. If such a strategy also needs to be climate-aware, what is the cost in terms of target-factor erosion?

Given small-cap outperformance since March 2020, investors are asking how these stocks size up in terms of short-term valuation, sentiment and macro outlook? Longer term, might small caps help capture opportunities around thematic investing megatrends?

Stock-level momentum has been a strong-performing factor, historically, but industry-level momentum has also shown significant historical premium. While the two were closely related, unique information was embedded in each and a combined momentum factor outperformed each individually.