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Remy Briand
Head of ESG
About the Contributor
As Head of ESG and Real Estate at MSCI, Remy Briand is responsible for research across all MSCI products, including indexes, risk models and ESG (environmental, social and governance) ratings. Over his 25 year career as an investor, independent thinker and business leader, Remy has gained unique insights on topics including global investing, emerging markets, sustainable investment and financial innovation. He regularly shares his views at industry conferences and with financial news media. Remy holds an MSc in Computer Sciences from INSA (Lyon) and an MBA from HEC (Paris).
Blog posts by Remy Briand
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The latest salvo in a long-running war of words between active and passive managers came recently from AllianceBernstein in a paper titled “The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing Is Worse Than Marxism.” The paper, which argues that passive investing misallocates capital, reminds me of a round of arguments a few years back between David Smith of the U.K.-based advisory firm, Hargreaves Lansdown, and Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, in which each argued that active or passive managers are parasites.
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The decision by a majority of U.K. voters to leave the European Union shines a light on fissures between perceived winners and losers from globalized markets and highlights for investors the importance of factoring the consequences of inequality and popular discontent into their views.
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In recent years, we have emphasized repeatedly that investors need to have a forward-looking view of risk, to anticipate and model extreme events, and, if appropriate, act to ensure their ability to withstand them. Some scenarios never materialize while others, including the U.K. deciding to leave the European Union, do.
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Investors who aim to understand what drives returns over the long run might look to the Land of the Midnight Sun.
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Market movements in the first three months of the year reflected wide gyrations in investors’ assumptions about macroeconomic conditions and asset pricing.
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The volatility of currency has increased in recent years as a combination of quantitative easing and currency wars fuel swings in the foreign-exchange market.
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Call it a lost decade. The value factor recently marked 10 years of decline in the U.S.
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The fitfulness of the global recovery has produced quick and unexpected changes in financial markets and handed portfolio managers the challenge of allocating assets amid the market stress.
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If 2015 market volatility frayed investor nerves, 2016 might be even more of a nail-biter. MSCI identified 12 stress points globally to be used in quantifying the effect on portfolios of a range of shifts in markets, liquidity and the macroeconomy.
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Almost five years ago, MSCI introduced a new line of “multi-factor indexes” that combine factor building blocks into multi-factor combinations to enable investors to focus on specific investment objectives or reflect particular expectations about market performance.