Blog posts

This month’s UN COP15 biodiversity summit will accelerate the discussion around nature loss and advance the notion that mismanagement of investment portfolios’ biodiversity impact entails risks. On a positive note, innovation in datasets now allow the integration of biodiversity metrics in investment strategies and indices, opening the possibility of similar progress in this field as has occurred in recent years with climate action.

The new SDI Innovation Outlook dataset from the Sustainable Development Investments Asset Owner Platform (SDI AOP) helps investors anticipate companies’ future contributions to the SDGs based on patenting of intellectual property.

The index follows a unique patents-based stock selection methodology targeting innovators and specialists that are helping create and deploy the Metaverse. With it, Qontigo expands its wide suite of thematic indices harnessing the upside of companies at the vanguard of new technologies.

Changes were announced as part of the December regular review of the DAX 50 ESG, DAX ESG Target, DAX ESG Screened and DAX indices.

Revenue-based thematic indices allow investors to target the companies benefitting from disruptive and structural economic trends. But how can investors access the earlier stages of those trends, and harness the upside of higher growth rates?

The STOXX Global 1800 index added 7.1% in dollars last month, matching its performance in October. The benchmark has still lost 14.5% in 2022, poised for its worst year since 2008.

Qontigo has been busy in the past two years enhancing the DAX rulebook, to bolster the quality of constituent companies, bring selection criteria in line with international standards and improve representativeness of the underlying markets. Serkan Batir, Qontigo’s Managing Director for Indices, says the overhaul helps ensure the benchmark is fit for purpose in an evolving financial landscape.

The first collaboration between Postal Savings Bank of China and Qontigo will allow the lender’s clients to access a portfolio of large Chinese equities chosen for their sustainability scores and optimized to limit deviations from the benchmark in terms of risk and industry allocation.

In the race to net-zero and the era of sustainable investing, indices can have a bigger role than just channeling capital to specific goals. At Qontigo we believe we must engage with index constituents to encourage best practices in climate alignment and explain the impact that climate-related metrics can have on index composition.

Technological advancements are at the core of many disruptive economic trends harnessed by the STOXX Thematic indices. We look at seven of the strategies — from automation to electric vehicles and smart city infrastructure — designed to track the companies shaping our digital future.

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.