News & Research

Factor risk models can help hedge fund managers understand risk factors and exposures and can be an important part of their toolset. This is why we provide clients both statistical and fundamental risk models as a standard package, enhancing the potential for signal and alpha generation.

The rise of the mass affluent market and its rapidly changing customer behaviour and preferences have been the driving force behind digital acceleration in the wealth management ecosystem. In this blog, Tanya Bartolini, Co-Founder of multi-asset investment technology provider Jacobi, explains how wealth management organizations can use institutional-grade technology to ‘lift the lid’ on investment decision-making and provide richer insights to clients.

If you are a wealth manager, you are unlikely to have had a conversation about the performance of your clients’ portfolios without talking about taxes. Yet, surprisingly, much of the research and discussion about portfolio management is based on pre-tax returns.

On the surface, constructing a sustainable portfolio or index may seem relatively straightforward. After all, it’s just about excluding and reweighting – or is it?

As the sustainability landscape continues to grow and change, there is a pressing need for evolving data that helps investors to better understand the sustainability outcomes associated with their investments. The SDI AOP has set out to address this, with continuously growing datasets updated quarterly, to assess companies’ contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. James Leaton, Research Director of the SDI AOP, discusses the latest platform developments led by its asset-owner led community.

High yield bonds have significantly outperformed higher rated debt in the first seven months of 2023, posting strong positive returns, despite a considerable rise in interest rates and concerns about the health of the banking system earlier this year.

A new whitepaper from Qontigo’s research team explores the benefits of constructing an exclusions portfolio with an optimizer, which helps limit active risk and frees up capital to allocate towards sustainability or performance objectives.

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure has impacted stock prices for regional banks, which have lost over 25% in the short period since the announcement that the bank needed to raise more capital on Thursday. However, how has this affected the credit markets?

As part of the recently announced partnership between CEPRES and Qontigo, we are developing a suite of factor risk models that provide broad coverage of the private market space in Axioma Risk.

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.

The Sustainable Development Investments Asset Owner Platform (SDI AOP) helps investors assess companies’ contributions to sustainability themes using the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The asset owner-led effort provides a robust SDG-alignment framework and data, and is already used worldwide by investors for implementation and tracking of sustainability strategies, and engagement with multiple stakeholders.

In a new research paper, we showcase how a portfolio manager can replicate fixed income indices using the Axioma Portfolio Optimizer and the new Axioma Credit Factor Model to create optimal US high- yield portfolios. In the workflow, we replicate a US high yield index with liquid bonds and a set of derivatives and test the solution from a risk perspective. The end goal is to create a set of portfolios that is more cost efficient, as (or more) liquid and as diversified as the index.