News & Research

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.

In this research paper, we showcase how a portfolio manager can replicate fixed income indices using the Axioma Portfolio Optimizer and the Axioma Credit Spread Factor Risk Model. 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.

Another tech bubble may be about to burst, triggering a US recession. There are multiple similarities between the current tech bubble and the dot-com bubble. This time, however, the Fed cannot leverage interest-rate cuts to put the brakes on a market decline, due to the current record-high inflation combined with low interest rates.

Using our portfolio construction tools combined with Redpoint’s forecasted dividend yield, alpha signal and local market expertise, we developed an optimized income methodology.

Foreign-exchange rates can be very volatile. Investors looking to bet on markets outside their own base currency must decide whether to embrace or mitigate the additional risk. In this paper, we propose a stress-testing framework that can help investors with the decision whether “to hedge or not to hedge”, given their assumptions on expected returns and cross-asset correlations.

Tax alpha is an often-overlooked source of improving passive and smart-beta index performance with direct indexing offering an approach to harvest tax alpha in practice. Once confined to high-net worth investors, direct indexing is open to a much lower threshold, allowing wealth managers to help their clients harvest losses and defer gains on individual securities in the portfolio while tracking a parent index and satisfying each client’s personal needs.

Direct indexing continues to gain momentum as an investment strategy for its potential to provide higher post-tax returns and portfolio customization. Direct indexing strategies with active tax management target higher post-tax portfolio returns by achieving pre-tax investment goals with lower tax costs. In this paper, we investigate the benefit of active tax management for direct indexing strategies tracking broad cap-weighted equity market indices.

In this paper, we take a closer look at the pairwise interactions of some of the asset-class pairs and review how they affected the risk of a global multi-asset class portfolio over the past 14 months, with a particular focus on the most recent environment.

In a surprising turn of events, most equity markets finished 2020 with sizable gains—and the fourth quarter unquestionably did its part. Benchmark risk continued to slide in Q4—except for a blip in November—but still ended the year higher than where it started. Factor returns went wild in Q4 and many regions saw outsized returns for the year.

Sector-allocation decisions form an integral part of many investment processes, both in equity and fixed income portfolio management. Most benchmark providers in both asset classes provide a wide range of sector sub-indices, and many risk models contain sector factors. By comparing Axioma’s new Factor-based Fixed Income Risk Model with a more traditional approach, we demonstrate that while sectors do play a role in credit investment management, they do so to a much lesser extent than one might expect.

There is no denying the impact of climate change — and associated regulatory realities — on the business of investment management. For portfolio managers, it is essential to understand how to successfully adapt and prepare for what some call the “mother of all correlated risks”. Here we expose — in three parts — what portfolio managers need to know when switching to a fully Paris Aligned Benchmark (PAB) portfolio from a current market-cap weighted (CWB) portfolio.

The global equity market recovery continued in the third quarter, as benchmark risk slid. But not all components of risk participated in the decline, and volatility remained much higher than it was when the year started.