The recent COVID-19 lockdowns in China and their impact on global supply chains add another concern for investors, on top of the Russia-Ukraine war. We model three scenarios for China and their potential spillover effects on global portfolios.

Value rebounded in 2021, after more than a decade of lackluster performance. No matter what the expectation going forward, there are useful lessons to be learned from value strategies’ behavior over the past two decades.

The Russian government’s decision on April 29 to pay holders of two dollar-denominated Russian sovereign bonds led to a major rally, encouraging some investors that Russia may avoid default. There are, however, more challenges ahead. 

As corporate-bond investors embrace decarbonization as a goal in portfolio construction and management and benchmark selection, the question arises whether decarbonization targets are at odds with other desirable index attributes, such as liquidity.

Sanctions on Russia have not affected credit-default swaps directly, but the settlement process following a default would rely on delivering and auctioning the sanctioned bonds. We examine this new form of recovery risk.

Download the special report highlighting key liquidity indicators from the Russia-Ukraine War.

Investors are increasingly focused on inflation and the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy. With the Russia-Ukraine war and resulting sanctions, they may also worry about slowing economic growth. We model three economic scenarios’ potential impact on markets.

The MSCI Security Crowding Model extends the framework of the MSCI Factor Crowding Model to individual securities. Our primary motivation was to identify crowded stocks, which we assumed would underperform, on average, and be more susceptible to crashes. If the model is working as intended, we also assume uncrowded stocks would outperform. This would be consistent with our factor-crowding research. Because any security-level characteristic could potentially be a factor, we evaluated our crowding score and components as factors.