Continue active refreshing of this index's data?
Continue active refreshing of this index's data?
Thought leadership
Most Recent Thought leadership
Index | Index / ETFs
Q&A with State Street and Qontigo: ESG ETFs evolving alongside investors’ deeper sustainability commitment
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.
Index | ESG & Sustainability
A view from COP26: navigating the climate transition with investable indices
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.
Index | Benchmarks
Lyxor’s Scheehl: switch of Europe 600 ETF’s index will cater to growing pool of ESG-minded investors
Lyxor ETF Germany and Austria’s Head of Product Development & Engineering explains how the change in the underlying index for the Lyxor 1 STOXX® Europe 600 UCITS ETF means the fund now complies with sustainability labels and meets the responsible criteria of retail and institutional European investors.
Index | ESG & Sustainability
Q&A with the IIA and Qontigo: ESG indices need to balance regulatory needs, investment objectives through customized solutions
Rick Redding of the Index Industry Association (IIA) and Qontigo’s Arun Singhal discuss what role indices will play in an asset-management industry increasingly veering towards sustainability considerations in the portfolio-construction process.
Sustainability indices and analytics are crucial catalysts for investors to transition from ‘brown’ to ‘green’ portfolios. However, the shift is being hindered, among other things, by inconsistent national legislations and lack of proper ESG disclosures from companies. Regulators have a key role to play to overcome these obstacles.
As sustainable investing’s uptake continues to gather pace, index-based solutions have gained investors’ favor as a simple, low-cost and transparent way to implement sustainable strategies.
Index | ESG & Sustainability
Practitioners’ panel discusses growth of exchange-traded ESG derivatives, outlook for next generation of solutions
A webinar organized by Risk.net and Eurex addressed the surge in interest in ESG derivatives and explored what lies ahead for the market amid increasing regulation and continued improvements in data and index design.
Index | ESG & Sustainability
BlackRock’s Sperandeo on responsible investing — and how indices can help make active decisions and measure impact
Manuela Sperandeo, BlackRock’s EMEA Head of Sustainable Indexing, discusses her firm’s investment mandate tracking the iSTOXX APG World Responsible Low-Carbon SDI Index, and explains how using indices can enhance transparency, efficiency and predictability in the construction process of a climate-aware and sustainable portfolio.
Index | ESG & Sustainability
Q&A with FlexShares: Quality and ESG as risk-control tools for EM Low-Vol, High-Dividend strategies
We talk to Abhishek Gupta, FlexShares’ Senior Quantitative Strategist, about the company’s new ETFs covering low volatility and high dividend strategies in emerging markets. The funds, which track STOXX indices, include Northern Trust Asset Management’s proprietary quality and ESG screens, as well as climate filters, aimed at helping improve risk-adjusted returns.
Index
Qontigo’s Seegopaul and Gu: ‘iSTOXX APG Responsible Investment Indices Designed for New Era of Sustainability’
The iSTOXX APG World Responsible Investment Indices were designed to ‘layer in’ various sustainability filters in order to measure the effect on risk and returns of each individual ESG criteria on a developed-markets global equities portfolio. Hamish Seegopaul and Yurong Gu explain how the new indices came about and discuss the value of the collaboration with the Netherlands’ APG and with BlackRock.