Blog Posts

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.

Siepe shares its view on the partnership, the significance of the solution, and the key trends it is helping to address among its hedge fund, asset management and asset owner clients.

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.

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.

When the Axioma Global Multi-Asset Class Risk Model (AXGMM) is combined with the industry-leading Axioma Portfolio Optimizer, the ability to track, tilt and hedge multi-asset class portfolios is exceptional. But its prowess in handling fixed income portfolios on their own should not be overlooked.

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.

In the fifth anniversary of the launch of the first thematic ETFs resulting from the collaboration between BlackRock and Qontigo, we reflect on the performance of seven strategies covered in this partnership: Automation & Robotics, Ageing Population, Digitalization, Electric Vehicles, Digital Security, Healthcare Innovation and Smart City Infrastructure.

The STOXX Global 1800 Index climbs 5.4% in month when measured in dollars and including dividends, led by US and European markets. Factor, thematic and dividend strategies struggle to catch up with strong showing from benchmarks.

The latest addition to our expanding risk model suite is a Carbon Emission Price factor. With sustainability playing an increasingly important role in investor decision making, the new factor tracks a stock’s sensitivity to carbon-emissions prices. The factor is calculated by using the one-year node from the Axioma Constant Maturity Futures Curve based on the European Carbon Emission Allowances (EUA) futures traded on the European Energy Exchange (EEX).

B3, operator of the Brazilian stock exchange, will list futures on the two European blue-chip indices in December. The new products will give local investors direct access to the European market without leaving their home exchange.