News & Research

This article examines six ESG and climate metrics of the group of stocks that have led gains in the STOXX Europe 600. It is useful to understand the dispersion within this group and that of the ‘Magnificent 7’ at the security level, and the specific risks and opportunities individual corporate performance presents, argues Hernando Cortina of ISS ESG.

Volatility is playing an increasingly important role in markets and portfolios. We sat down with two experts to ask them how investors use listed derivatives such as VSTOXX and VIX futures and options to trade market swings.

STOXX has published its most complete study to date of VSTOXX, the flagship gauge of equity market volatility in the Eurozone. Explore the methodology behind the index, the concept of volatility, and available trading strategies — from theory to use cases.

The EURO STOXX 50 Volatility-Balanced index, which combines an investment in stocks with a dynamic allocation to volatility futures, jumped 8% on August 5 amid a broad equities sell-off. The volatility strategy has returned an average of 3.2 percentage points a year above its benchmark since 2006 as tail-risk protection paid off.

A portfolio’s decarbonization becomes more difficult once an emissions reduction of 60% is achieved, as high-emissions sectors become depleted. Thereafter, the portfolio construction approach — whether exclusion or optimization — will make a difference to the resulting tracking error and size of the portfolio.

A new study from specialists at BlackRock and STOXX explores the potential benefits of low tracking-error, multifactor portfolios. While factor investing has historically been dominated by single-factor strategies with relatively strong tilts, the authors show that diversification across multiple factors with smaller tilts and less tracking error can pay off in the long run.

Recent market developments and investing trends have prompted investors to reconsider their investment allocations. Factors assist investors in understanding the present market and informing their investment decisions. Melissa Brown, Managing Director of Applied Research, joins two experts to discuss factor investing in this video.

The collapse of a Californian bank triggered a rapidly-spreading banking crisis, with Europe suffering the brunt of it. European Banks, Financial Services firms and Insurers have fallen more than their US counterparts, while the risk of each one of those sectors in Europe has jumped.

The recent collapse of several banks has sparked fears of a 2011-style “doom loop,” in which losses in the financial sector spread to the wider economy. So far, contagion has been limited, but a further deterioration in credit quality could result in drawdowns across all sectors.

Using Axioma’s Macroeconomic Projection Model, we decompose the risk factors that drove returns in the STOXX Global Broad Infrastructure between 2020 and 2022. The results show the index had a positive exposure to the risk model’s inflation factors, meaning it stood to benefit from rising global inflation expectations.

We look into the economic risks of employing factor-style strategies such as those in the STOXX Factor Indices, by screening them through Axioma’s Macroeconomic Projection model. The findings show that some styles have more economic exposure than others, and that macro variables can be correlated with industry, country and style factors, to different degrees.

The FAANGs — Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (i.e., Alphabet) — are having an annus horribilis. But they still have gains to show for the past three years, and, importantly for investors, the group’s influence on the US market has only decreased so much.