Clearing Brazilian forests to make way for agriculture may generate a backlash to its soy and beef producers if purchasers impose deforestation-free requirements. What are the potential implications for investors in Brazilian corporate and sovereign debt?

COVID-19 disrupted operating models for many businesses, forcing a shift to remote working, digitization and low-contact services, which we term “Remote Operation Capability” (ROC). Using machine learning and natural language processing techniques we built a potential ROC factor that looks at the extent to which a company was able to thrive in this environment.

With COVID-19 spreading across the globe, we are observing severe spikes in liquidity parameters. In order to keep you informed, we have created the MSCI Liquidity Risk Monitor Special Report, a weekly interim report, demonstrating the behavior of several liquidity risk indicators during the global COVID-19 crisis.

As markets rallied worldwide, investors took on high-beta exposure and rotated away from stocks with lower risk. The latest edition of Factors in Focus explores the details.

In the months since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies issued a large amount of corporate bonds. As a result of this surge, corporate debt has grown substantially — a burden that institutional credit investors may wish to monitor closely.

Model testing is a key requirement for collateral behavior forecasting models in securitized products. The traditional method focuses on a single dimension, and does not provide a clear measure of model accuracy and effectiveness. Instead, a rank-based error-tracking methodology provides an efficient and comprehensive approach to measure model performance.

Many real estate markets were showing signs of a slowdown even before COVID-19’s negative impact on property portfolios. Has this correction been similar to previous ones? We looked at dispersion of returns, within and across real estate sectors, for the answer.