Research Report

Last year, 157 new ETFs and ETNs were launched in the United States - one-tenth of the total of 1,546, according to ETF.com. But how many of these new funds can be called real "innovations"? Take the hottest area of the market: what many investors call "smart beta", "strategic beta" or "factor investing". These are index strategies that take bets against the market in an attempt to either deliver risk-adjusted outperformance or to capture some...

Indexes

Research Report

Although factor allocation approaches based on simple diversification techniques such as equal-weight or risk parity are transparent and have performed well historically, some investors, such as valuation-sensitive or macro-sensitive investors, utilize a dynamic approach by adapting factor allocations to be more consistent with their strategic or tactical asset allocation process. An adaptive approach aims to strike a balance between a pure single factor timing strategy and the...

Indexes

Research Report

Factor investing has become increasingly popular in developed markets. In this paper, we show that they have worked in emerging markets as well. All six MSCI Emerging Markets Factor Indexes outperformed the parent index over a 15-year plus period, based on simulations. Investors seeking premia in addition to broad EM beta can explore factor index investing via this index series. Active EM managers can also benefit from these tools. Traditionally, they have mainly harvested EM beta, along with...

Indexes

Research Report

With the rise of factor investing, institutional investors increasingly have sought to understand whether their factor exposures are crowded. Current MSCI Barra equity factor risk models are designed to provide insight and detail to help institutional investors understand how a portfolio is positioned and what has driven its risk and return. The MSCI Integrated Factor Crowding Model is designed to complement the Barra model by providing investors with insight into how the rest of the market...

Risk Management Analytics

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Research Report

Factor-based investing has become a widely discussed topic of today's investment canon. In this paper - which is the last delivery of a four-paper series focusing on factor investing - we discuss the combinations of Factor Indexes taking as an example the MSCI Quality Mix Index.The MSCI Quality Mix Index is an equal weighted combination of the MSCI Quality, Value and Minimum Volatility Indexes. Academic research shows that quality, value and low volatility strategies have not only...

Indexes

MSCI Blog

Momentum, the tendency of past winners to continue to do well in the near future, is used widely in risk models and in quantitative strategies. Recently, momentum has also been the basis for factor indexes aiming to replicate the performance of this pervasive factor.

Research Report

Investors have increasingly turned to equity factors as building blocks for their stock portfolios as a way to measure performance, analyze risk exposures or seek enhanced returns. In recent years, some investors have sought to extend a factor framework to fixed income. But these efforts by and large have not been successful, as equity and fixed-income investors have not been speaking a common language. We simulated the performance of six fixed-income factors — value, low size, quality,...

Indexes Portfolio Management Analytics Risk Management Analytics

MSCI Blog

During low interest-rate, high-volatility environments, some investors have turned to high dividend-paying stocks. However, overly simplistic approaches to selecting dividend-paying securities exposed investors to potential “yield traps.” Could these traps have been avoided?