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Raina Oberoi

Raina Oberoi

Managing Director, MSCI Research

​Raina Oberoi is a Managing Director & Global Head of Equity Solutions Research. She and her team conduct research on addressing investment challenges that clients face by designing appropriate solutions to help clients with their investment needs. Raina joined MSCI in 2014 and before that spent time as an index strategist in sales & trading at Morgan Stanley.
Raina has a B.S. in Finance and an MBA from Columbia Business School. She is also a Trustee for the Oliver Scholars Program and focusses on mentoring junior women in Finance.

Research and Insights

Articles by Raina Oberoi

    Investment Trends in Focus: Quarterly Roundtable Q1 2024

    Podcast | Jan 18, 2024 | Oliver Marchand, Raina Oberoi, Afsaneh Mastouri, Ashley Lester

    Ashley Lester and team help investors find the connections between — and evaluate the risks and potential opportunities of — AI, geopolitics and the effects of climate change, as well as the growing importance of private capital and continued influence of monetary policy.

    Householding: One Client, Many Accounts

    Research Report | Dec 7, 2023 | László Arany, Laszlo Hollo, Joseph Wickremasinghe, Raina Oberoi

    Householding applies one target asset allocation across all family assets and manages them holistically for the highest practicable after-tax return. We compare the outcomes of two use cases for householding vs. a single-portfolio approach. 

    The Apple-fication of Investing

    Podcast | Nov 22, 2023 | Raina Oberoi, Joseph Wickremasinghe

    Listen in on an in-depth discussion about the growing demand for and personalized tax-efficient strategies from wealth-management clients — driven by technological revolution and the coming, intergenerational transfer of wealth.

    How Asset Owners Are Preparing for the New Era of Investing

    8 mins read Blog | Nov 2, 2023 | Ashley Lester, Raina Oberoi, Andy Sparks, Peter Shepard

    Key insights from the recent MSCI Institutional Investor Forum highlight how forces of disruption are driving asset owners to evolve their assessment of risks and how developments in AI can further blend quantitative and qualitative investment analysis.

    Measuring Tax Alpha

    Research Report | Oct 27, 2023 | László Arany, Laszlo Hollo, Joseph Wickremasinghe, Raina Oberoi

    The concept of tax alpha can help a wealth manager explain a client’s after-tax performance. We propose two frameworks to provide transparency around the after-tax attribution calculation used to measure tax alpha.

    The Impact of Tax Management on Client-Designed Portfolios

    Research Report | Jun 21, 2023 | Joseph Wickremasinghe, Raina Oberoi

    We analyze a framework for wealth managers considering the impact of managing their clients’ investment preferences alongside different tax-management approaches. 

    The Rise and Fall of Big Tech

    6 mins read Blog | Nov 22, 2022 | Abhishek Gupta, Raina Oberoi

    U.S. tech giants had a spectacular run over the past decade, but the tide has turned for many of these companies in 2022. We evaluate Big Tech’s descent and discuss the efficacy of building resilient portfolios.

    Globalization Gets Another Jolt

    2 mins read Quick Take | Mar 2, 2022 | Peter Zangari

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine is another reminder that geopolitics play an outsized role in determining economic relations between countries.

    Latin American Equity Markets: The Lay of the Land

    6 mins read Blog | Feb 16, 2022 | Raina Oberoi, Román Mendoza

    How is Latin America different from other emerging markets? We analyze the influence of foreign direct investment; market performance; exposure to sectors and thematic investments; ESG and climate risks and opportunities and corporate-ownership structures. 

    Are Factors & ESG the New Tea & Biscuits?

    Podcast | Sep 2, 2021 | Raina Oberoi

    What’s behind the growth of ETFs that combine factors and ESG? Some feel it’s a natural partnership, an inevitable evolution, while others have questions about the explanatory power of ESG and the effects of integrating it into portfolios. We explore the topic with MSCI’s Raina Oberoi and Anthony Kruger of iShares.

    Addressing the Lower Liquidity of Smaller Stocks

    3 mins read Quick Take | Jul 7, 2021 | Raina Oberoi, Ana Harris

    Despite the potential benefits of investing in small-cap stocks, investors often worry about liquidity, ease and ability to trade, at the lower end of the market-cap spectrum; specifically, costs and access.

    Were Small Caps Immune to Concentration?

    2 mins read Quick Take | Jun 9, 2021 | Raina Oberoi, Ana Harris

    A few weeks ago, we looked at the historical and current concentration of a range of regional indexes and noted there had been an increase in concentration across the globe. 

    Small Caps’ Revenue Exposure and the Global Recovery

    2 mins read Quick Take | May 26, 2021 | Raina Oberoi, Ana Harris

    The volume of world merchandise trade fell by 5.3% in 2020, while travel services were down by 63%, according to estimates by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, the WTO expects recovery from the pandemic’s effects to be swift, with regional differences, and world merchandise trade volume to increase by 8.0% in 2021. But even before the pandemic, global trade had shown signs of slowing, and the growth trend appeared to be flattening. There were several reasons, from increased...

    Diversifying with Small Caps

    2 mins read Quick Take | May 12, 2021 | Raina Oberoi, Ana Harris

    When investors are considering adding new types of investments to their portfolios, they examine not only the risk and return profiles of those new allocations, but also whether they might add diversification benefits.

    Are Your Clients Ready for US Tax Day?

    6 mins read Blog | May 10, 2021 | Raina Oberoi, Yuliya Plyakha Ferenc, Joseph Wickremasinghe, Paulina Serrano

    Given the complexity of U.S. tax regulation, wealth advisers continue to grapple with how to build tax-efficient portfolios while balancing clients’ other objectives. We propose a rules-based way of doing so and analyze its benefits and trade-offs.

    Risk and Volatility in Small Caps

    3 mins read Quick Take | Apr 28, 2021 | Raina Oberoi, Ana Harris

    We recently looked at small caps through the lens of historical performance during economic recovery. 

    Revisiting Small Caps

    2 mins read Quick Take | Apr 14, 2021 | Raina Oberoi, Ana Harris

    As the world economy starts to feel the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines, some investors have started to revisit the role of small-cap stocks in their portfolios. 

    Can diversification help weather the coronavirus storm?

    Blog | Apr 16, 2020 | Raina Oberoi, Abhishek Gupta, Jean-Maurice Ladure

    Whether investors include a tactical approach or invest strategically for the long term, diversifying across factors, sectors and geographies has historically played an important role in portfolio construction. 

    Fall Seven Times, Stand Up Eight

    Podcast | Apr 9, 2020 | Raina Oberoi

    Raina Oberoi, head of index solutions research for the Americas, takes inspiration from the resilience of her fellow New Yorkers as they deal with being the U.S. epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, and compares it to the resilience her research has found in some expected — and unexpected — areas of the market. Has there been a shift in how investors analyze and manage portfolios?

    Quantifying ESG fund performance

    Blog | Apr 6, 2020 | Raina Oberoi, Guillermo Cano

    One challenge facing investors is how to quantify the impact ESG has had on their investment process. We analyzed top ESG funds to better understand the contribution of the ESG factor to their performance.

    Evaluating Emerging-Market Stocks through a Governance Lens

    Blog | Feb 21, 2019 | Raina Oberoi, Anil Rao

    Emerging-market stocks generally are perceived to have lower governance standards than their developed-market counterparts. Less transparency is one factor behind this view. Some emerging-market companies may also disadvantage minority shareholders. How can active and index-based investors address these issues?

    What Fed monetary policy has meant for factors

    Blog | Feb 6, 2019 | Abhishek Gupta, Raina Oberoi

    As interest rates in the U.S. started increasing in late 2015, many investors expressed concerns over the impact that rising rates could have on their investments. However, the tone of the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) shifted from “we’re a long way from neutral” in October last year to a more accommodative stance of “we will be patient” early this year, re-emphasizing that expression at the January 2019 Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

    Evaluating Opportunities in Active Management

    Research Report | May 17, 2018 | Abhishek Gupta, Raina Oberoi, Subramanian Aylur

    Despite institutional investors, globally, continuing to allocate funds to indexed strategies, active management remains attractive across various products and geographies. The ability to select skilled managers in opportune markets who can add value beyond a indexed investment tracking an index, may justify the case for active implementation. We analyze different segments of the equity markets to find the intersection of those that have provided the greatest opportunity and where managers...

    Why are Small Caps Different?

    Blog | Sep 18, 2017 | Raina Oberoi

    A lot has been written about the persistence of the global small-cap premium. But what, apart from size, distinguishes small-cap stocks from their large- and mid-cap counterparts, and how can these distinctions help institutional investors?

    Global small-cap fund capacity: no small matter

    Blog | Jun 15, 2017 | Raina Oberoi

    In recent years, pension funds around the world increasingly have shed their home bias and made global small-cap allocations.

    Why global small-cap stocks are becoming an important part of institutional portfolios

    Blog | Mar 16, 2017 | Raina Oberoi

    Institutional investors worldwide traditionally have tended to focus on the stocks of larger companies, finding them less risky, more liquid and offering greater investment capacity than small-cap stocks. But asset owners and managers increasingly are allocating strategically to the small-cap equity segment as part of their global equity portfolios i.e., via an “all-cap” approach.

    Understanding Factor Investing

    Research Report | Mar 30, 2016 | Raina Oberoi, Anil Rao, Subramanian Aylur, Lokesh Mrig

    The size premium has been widely used in asset allocation and in risk models for decades. However, some academics and practitioners have contested the validity of the size premium. They argue: 1) the size premium has disappeared in the last 20 years and no longer exists; 2) the size premium exists only in the United States and not in other markets; 3) the size premium disappears after filtering out smaller stocks for investability. In this paper, we refute these claims and examine ways of...

    "Factoring" in the Emerging Markets Premium - November 2014

    Research Report | Nov 5, 2014 | Raina Oberoi, Anil Rao, Subramanian Aylur, Philippe Durand

    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...