ESG & Sustainability

At a recent IPE webinar, experts from Qontigo and DWS discussed how investors can build a sustainable strategy considering their impact objectives, tracking error budgets and the need to comply with evolving regulation.

Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Hesse, and North Rhine-Westphalia are heightening the responsible profile of state pension funds by adopting customized versions of STOXX Paris-aligned benchmark indices for their investments.

Qontigo has licensed the global STOXX ESG Länder PAB Index family to four German federal states. PAB (Paris-aligned Benchmark) stands for the most ambitious EU regulation regarding fossil exclusion criteria and greenhouse gas decarbonization for index providers.

Two panels at the SRP Europe Conference 2023 discussed the role of index design in building structured products for a changing market landscape. Topics covered include rising interest rates and volatility, and growing demand for sustainability and thematic investment strategies.

The modular STOXX World indices allow investors to flexibly build portfolios covering a broad and liquid universe of stocks, slicing and dicing the world’s equity markets along regions, countries, market capitalization and sectors.

The exchange during a recent Savvy Investor webinar centered around ways to measure companies’ contribution towards achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and use those metrics in investment processes.

Changes were announced as part of the March regular review of the DAX 50 ESG, DAX 50 ESG+, DAX ESG Target, DAX ESG Screened and DAX indices.

US and Asian stocks fell in February, as better-than-expected economic reports in the US signaled the Federal Reserve has room to continue raising interest rates. European shares climbed when measured in euros.

Fourth quarter 2022 insights from Qontigo, revealed that the ESG segment of the total global passive ETF market is just 4.7 per cent but accounted for more than 10 per cent of all net new assets across the industry in 2022.

As more investments are channeled into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a Qontigo whitepaper examines what the strategies may mean in terms of returns. The study uses a new, forward-looking analysis from the Sustainable Development Investments Asset Owner Platform (SDI AOP) on companies’ patents aligned with the SDGs, and finds that a high patent/SDG score can be an alpha-generating signal.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a proxy for the new SDI Innovation Outlook score in predicting equity returns and enabling the construction of outperforming portfolios.