MSCI Blog

In times of heightened volatility, risk limits can protect against equity-market drawdowns. While such measures can dampen portfolio losses, they may also have an impact on long-term returns, particularly in case of a sharp V-shaped market recovery.

MSCI Blog

Investors may employ leverage with lower-risk asset classes such as bonds to seek higher risk and returns. We assessed the effects of leverage on the returns of three hypothetical multi-asset-class portfolios during the COVID-19 crisis.

MSCI Blog

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on how companies manage cash flows and liquidity. Bond investors face the possibility of increased leverage, rating downgrades and defaults. Can factors and ESG metrics shed light on these risks?

ESG Indexes

MSCI Blog

Clearing Brazilian forests to make way for agriculture may spur a backlash to soy and beef producers if purchasers impose deforestation-free rules. What are the potential implications for debt of affected companies and for Brazilian sovereign debt?

MSCI Blog

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.

MSCI Blog

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.

MSCI Blog

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.

Global Intel

MSCI Blog

After the U.S. COVID-19 lockdown, new monthly remittance reports for asset-backed securities indicated performance deterioration and signaled potential challenges ahead. Meanwhile, in China, ABS showed signs of recovery.

MSCI Blog

Machine learning using neural networks has been successfully applied to fields in which extremely complex patterns can prove challenging for other algorithms. Are neural networks suited for modeling prepayment risk in agency mortgage-backed securities?

MSCI Blog

Our latest COVID-19 stress test looks at four potential financial-market outcomes ranging from a swift V-shaped recovery to a pessimistic L-shaped scenario, in which outbreaks recur and lockdowns return well into 2021.