Research Paper

ESG Products & Services Portfolio Management Analytics

MSCI Event

Indexes ESG Products & Services Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics Real Estate Products & Services

Research Paper

Indexes ESG Products & Services Portfolio Management Analytics

MSCI Blog

To gauge investor expectations after Joe Biden was declared winner of the U.S. election and good news broke about COVID vaccines, we surveyed 151 U.S.-based financial advisers. We examine the advisers’ views on the next 12 months and markets’ reaction since Election Day.

ESG Climate Solutions Equity Risk Models All Country Indexes

Research Paper

In this study, we focus on some of the issues investors face when constructing long-only non-optimized single-factor portfolios using simple heuristics-based rank-select-weight algorithms. In doing so, investors may ask: Should they start from a universe of securities with a fixed target-market-cap coverage or a fixed number of securities? Should they assess factor exposure based on single or multiple factor descriptors? How broad a subset of securities will they use from the underlying...

Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics

Research Paper

COVID-19 disrupted the operating models of many businesses and forced a shift to remote working, digitization and low-contact transactions and services, which we term “Remote Operation Capability” (ROC). Some corporations were better positioned to take advantage of a remote, automated and digitized operating environment. We utilized machine-learning and natural language-processing techniques to build a potential ROC factor that looks at the extent to which a company was more likely to thrive...

Risk Management Analytics Portfolio Management Analytics

Research Paper

Investors are increasingly concerned about how climate change and a transition to a low-carbon economy could impact the risk and return profile of their portfolios. In this case study, we selected a sample portfolio representative of a global actively managed fund in terms of its risk-return characteristics and used the MSCI Climate Value-at-Risk model to examine the different dimensions of climate-related risks. We show how Climate VaR can be used to measure climate risks for the portfolio...

ESG Products & Services Portfolio Management Analytics ESG Climate Solutions ESG Climate VaR

Research Paper

MSCI’s Barra Private Real Estate Model (PRE2), Barra Private Equity Model (PEQ2) and MSCI Private Infrastructure Model (PIN1) have advanced the understanding of investments in global private assets. Private assets were once considered low-risk investments uncorrelated with most public assets due to the smoothness in private asset valuations. With innovative statistical methodology, the MSCI private asset models reveal the intrinsic risk in private assets, show large exposures to systematic...

Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics

Research Paper

Linear regression models have been the workhorses of finance and economics. However, given increasing attention to nonlinear methods, we investigate the extent to which nonlinearities not captured by standard linear models within equity factor risk models are present. Adding nonlinear factors in simple polynomial functions of their linear counterparts contributed some additional explanatory power to the cross-section of security returns. Furthermore, some generated factor returns and...

Portfolio Management Analytics

Research Paper

Peer selection and understanding relationships between companies play a pivotal role in many areas of finance. Previously, we described a methodology for quantifying the similarity between every pair of companies from the text of their business descriptions in 10-K filings, fundamentals, news mentions and return correlations. We showed how the resulting similarity score matrix could be used to identify pairs or groups of similar companies (peers), which have numerous potential applications....

Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics