News & Research

Stocks fell in November, with indices reverting gains in the month’s last three sessions, as the emergence of the Omicron variant raised concerns the COVID-19 pandemic may continue to undermine the global economy.

Rebecca Chesworth, Senior Equities Strategist at State Street Global Advisors SPDR ETFs; and Hamish Seegopaul, Head of R&D for ESG and Quantitative Indices at Qontigo, discuss the change in underlying index for the SPDR® STOXX Europe 600 ESG Screened UCITS ETF and how clients’ ESG needs are shaping the product offering.

Sustainable investing strategies vary. Some investors, for example, simply want to improve ESG alignment. Others seek to maximize their impact on society, by investing in those companies that contribute the most to certain goals. While the metrics that underlie these approaches have some overlap, there is not perfect correlation, in terms of how metrics are defined, how portfolios are constructed, what is being targeted, etc.

In this post we employed a “fact-finding” approach to examine the issue of how much exposure to a single SDG a portfolio can potentially achieve, and how that exposure is related to active risk. For this analysis we used the Axioma Worldwide Fundamental Equity Factor Risk Model – Medium-Horizon and the SDG contribution from the SDI AOP data as of July 1, 2021.

Using the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for an impact-measurement approach can help understand and quantify companies’ real-world impact, a new whitepaper from Qontigo and Clarity AI argues. Such an approach enables investors to bridge an important gap at a time when impact has emerged as a key investment pillar, right next to risk and returns.

This is the second in a series of Qontigo and Clarity AI research papers, which focuses on the challenge of measuring impact as a key means of bridging the gap between impact investment theory and practice.

A panel at COP26 comprised of sustainability and index experts, including members of Willis Towers Watson and Qontigo, explains how the STOXX Willis Towers Watson Climate Transition Indices (CTIs) help investors manage climate-transition risk and align their investments for the economic transition to net zero.

One of the panels at the Sustainability & Impact Investor Forum in Monaco last month drew from the perspectives of active fund management, asset-owner and indexing specialists, who discussed the key drivers and approaches to incorporate the transition to net zero into investment portfolios.

The diversity of sustainability priorities means there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to ESG ETF products, says Qontigo’s Anna Georgieva and Saumya Mehrotra

Qontigo has introduced a Carbon Emission Price factor within the Axioma Worldwide Macroeconomic Projection Equity Factor Risk Model (“Macro Projection Model”).

In this whitepaper, we show how portfolios can be built that provide more attractive sustainability characteristics – without taking on too much risk.

Qontigo has joined the Net Zero Financial Service Providers Alliance (NZFSPA), thus committing to the attainment of net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 or sooner.