Research Paper

The explosion in alternative data has been a blessing and a curse to investment managers. We have identified one source that provided unique and uncorrelated information when added to analysis of traditional factors and other measures of sentiment. These consumer sentiment metrics may provide investors with additional transparency into sources of risk and return, and could potentially be used to create valuable new factors.

Indexes Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics

Research Paper

As important systematic sources of risk and return, factors play a vital role in building, maintaining and measuring actively managed equity portfolios. Investors and technology continue to grow more sophisticated, which has given rise to new ways of gathering, sorting and analyzing information — and new investment approaches. A factor-based approach can provide deeper insight into funds and individual securities. Research by MSCI and others has continued to show that factors have been...

Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics

Research Paper

Asset-allocation approaches have evolved from the traditional 60/40 split to the recent adoption of risk, rather than capital, budgeting across asset classes. However, asset-class buckets are not always clear-cut risk and return drivers. We present a factor-based asset-allocation framework to help investors who have begun to look through asset classes to factors — the underlying drivers of risk and returns.

ESG Products & Services Indexes Portfolio Management Analytics

Research Paper

For the past 30 years, emerging markets have provided return enhancement and risk diversification opportunities for global equity investors. The ongoing liberalization of the domestic Chinese capital market has the potential to transform the characteristics of the equity segment and its role in global portfolios. Recently, emerging markets have experienced volatile performance, driven by changes in monetary policy, increasing political uncertainty and deteriorating conditions for...

Indexes Portfolio Management Analytics

Research Paper

Why has there been no clear consensus as to whether ESG has improved returns on a risk-adjusted basis? We find that many of the ESG investing methodologies used in studies were designed to meet social or ethical values and not financial objectives. To understand the link between companies’ ESG characteristics and their financial risk and performance, it is important to evaluate only the studies that use ESG methodologies specifically designed to identify financially relevant issues, such as...

ESG Products & Services Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics

Research Paper

Peer selection plays a central role in many aspects of finance — including valuation, financial and competitive analysis, risk and portfolio modeling and ESG scoring and alpha generation. One common method of peers identification is industry classification, such as the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®). Here we ask if it’s possible to identify and measure relationships between companies from a systematic analysis of various types of data, including fundamentals, news and the...

Portfolio Management Analytics

Research Paper

Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics BarraOne

Research Paper

Factors define the sources of portfolio risk and return. In this paper, we review the theoretical and empirical foundations of our factor research and factor models. MSCI factor research is firmly grounded in academic theory and empirical evidence. MSCI factor models are based on robust econometric techniques and reflect best investment practice. MSCI methodologies are transparent and publicly available. This is why the world’s leading institutional investors use MSCI factor models and...

Indexes Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics

Research Paper

Asset owners use indexes as policy benchmarks and reference portfolios in their asset allocation. Index investors track cap-weighted indexes that seek to capture the market return. Active investors select securities and build portfolios that aim to outperform the market. All these types of investors may be able to benefit from incorporating factors into their process. More importantly, they may also be able to integrate factors without compromising other fundamentally important aspects of...

Indexes Portfolio Management Analytics

Research Paper

We examine the trading activity and pricing structure in the equity options market to infer the sentiment of options traders on the underlying equity. We find that metrics constructed from the level of options trading activity relative to the underlying stock and from comparing the pricing of puts relative to calls at various moneyness levels have implications for the cross section of stock returns. Importantly, we also find that the information in options sentiment is additive and orthogonal...

Portfolio Management Analytics