Future index innovations emerge from past experience. Within the context of 55 years as a global index provider, we review major global-equity trends via a series of charts and offer deeper insight into the role of index-construction parameters.

Some emerging-market (EM) stocks have bucked the trend of underperforming headline EM indexes following the 2008 global financial crisis. We used nearly 30 years of index- and stock-level returns to identify their shared fundamental attributes. 

In concentrated markets, investors can become wary of portfolios dominated by sentiment factors. A simple crowding-score-based constraint can help investors identify securities most at risk of de-rating. 

“Deconglomeration” in the 1980s signaled a shift to corporate specialization, particularly in the U.S. We found that diversified firms have tended to lag the profitability and growth of their single-industry counterparts.

Over the last 30 years, high geopolitical risk has been associated with lower equity returns and higher forecast volatilities. We show that measures of geopolitical risk have provided useful information beyond conventional measures of uncertainty. 

We found a strong historical correlation between a company’s MSCI ESG Rating and its cost of capital in both equity and debt markets. Firms assessed as the most resilient to financially material sustainability-related risks financed themselves more cheaply. 

We segmented India’s public equity market to study patterns in its factor, thematic and industry exposures. And to assess how the current market profile could change, we also analyzed private firms that may be in the pipeline to become public.