Thought leadership

Germany’s DAX is outperforming pan-European indices and its ETFs are luring record flows in 2025. Veronika Kylburg, Head of Global Benchmarks DAX at STOXX, discusses with the ETF publication what some of the drivers are behind this performance and explores the benchmark’s methodology changes since 2018.

This report, in partnership with ETF Stream, explores the macro and policy forces driving this momentum, the evolution of the DAX index family and how index innovation is helping investors express nuanced views across Germany’s growth story.

European defense and AI stocks were the focus of discussion during a breakout session at this year’s gathering in Frankfurt. ETF experts from Amundi and BlackRock weighed in on the drivers and outlook for two of the market’s strongest investment themes this year.

In a recent webinar, Lukas Ahnert, Senior Product Specialist at Xtrackers by DWS, and Arun Singhal, Head of Product Management and Client Success at STOXX, discussed the drivers behind Europe’s stock rally and the latest investment strategies designed in collaboration by both firms.

In this Perspectives report, we weigh the military sales exposures of a European defense portfolio, and examine its alignment with current sustainability regulations.

Timing the market is difficult, but how can we measure the degree of difficulty? A new STOXX whitepaper explores a metric — the ‘tail-implied volatility (TIV) spread’ — that can help investors understand the risk of anticipating market trends for different portfolios.

In this whitepaper, Hamish Seegopaul, Global Head of Index Product Innovation at STOXX, introduces a new metric — the tail-implied volatility (TIV) spread — to complement volatility, and help investors compare investments from the standpoint of timing risk.

AI is a vast and complex theme that covers multiple conceptual areas and technologies. How do patents help identify the AI innovators that are selected into STOXX thematic indices? We asked EconSight’s Kai Gramke and STOXX’s Ladi Williams.

Ladi Williams, Head of Thematics and Strategy Index Product Management at STOXX, explains how the index provider has catered to the specific needs and objectives of ETF managers in devising a series of indices targeting the defense sector.

DWS and STOXX have collaborated in the launch of ETFs tracking the ISS STOXX® Biodiversity indices. The product specialist discusses ongoing trends in climate and biodiversity investing, and why data is enabling a more thorough assessment of companies’ impact on our natural world.

A new STOXX whitepaper explores the relative performance behind a hypothetical European buffer index to assess its benefits and drawbacks. Using the EURO STOXX 50® benchmark as an underlying asset, the study analyzes the types of market drawdowns in which buffer strategies can perform the best, and how that performance evolves over the longer term.

Saumya Mehrotra, from STOXX’s Index Product Management team, recently talked to the Index Industry Association (IIA) for their ‘Index Minutes’ video series. She described the basics and the evolution of sustainability indices, and explained why index providers are at the core of sustainable investing.