Blog posts

Recently, the world’s largest asset managers of index-based funds have stepped up their stewardship role, pledging more active participation to assure that board decisions are aligned with ESG principles.

The violent market pullbacks that many traders had gotten used to living without are back. The STOXX® Global 1800 Index plunged 7.5%1 between Feb. 2 and Feb. 8, its steepest five-day decline since August 2015.

Last year, net inflows into so-called smart beta exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and products (ETPs) worldwide rose 33.2% from $54 billion in 2016 to $72 billion, according to ETFGI.

The McKinsey Global Institute writes that ‘artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to unleash the next wave of digital disruption.’ 

Rather than slow down, the record-breaking rally in global equities accelerated in the first month of 2018, with little clouding investors’ increasing conviction that the world economy is on firm footing.

Much of the media coverage of artificial intelligence (AI) has been focusing, rightly so, on the fantastic new possibilities enabled by empowered, human-like computers.

Somehow ironically, in the year when President Trump announced the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on global warming, more investors turned to climate-aware strategies, helping them outperform.

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has penetrated most industries and services, with machines now handling an increasing number of tasks that only humans could once do.

While we tend to think of artificial intelligence (AI) as the future, the truth is the technology has already transformed asset managers’ core business beyond recognition.

As we reviewed the outlook for equity markets in 2018 in a recent article, UBS highlighted the disruptive trends of digitalization and robotics in its forecast, pointing out that technology stocks may continue their march higher.

In “An Aussie sense of style”, Axioma’s latest paper on smart beta products, we take a look at the inherent compromise between delivering target factor purity versus maximizing factor exposure.

After a bumper year for equities, strategists are forecasting further gains for 2018, while pointing to risks from rising bond yields and higher volatility.