Whitepapers

This paper explores the design of the STOXX U.S. Equity Factor index and the Multifactor signal that lies at the core of the STOXX Equity Factor suite designed in collaboration with BlackRock.

This whitepaper takes a comprehensive and in-depth look at the objective, methodology, coverage and calculation of the VSTOXX indices in the most complete study on the topic from STOXX to date. It also reviews the strategies and available derivatives tracking the main VSTOXX, which have underpinned volatility’s status as a separate asset class.

New regulation and industry efforts point to sources of portfolio risk — particularly of the Social ESG type — for both developers and deployers of AI systems. As the technology advances quickly, governments and companies are stepping up efforts to ensure it is not prone to misuse and abuse.

As the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) tightens guidelines on fund names to mitigate greenwashing risks, fund managers face new challenges. In our latest report, we explore the implications of ESMA’s new rules on the use of terms like “ESG” and “sustainable” in fund names, and how these changes may impact both investment strategies and marketing practices.

This report delves into the STOXX® Digital Asset Blue Chip Index’s construction process to unpick the crypto-native metrics used in asset selection. It also provides an analysis of what the index offers in terms of risk and returns and its prowess as a barometer of the underlying market.

As biodiversity garners increased attention and data availability expands, understanding its effect on portfolios becomes paramount. In our first edition of Perspectives, we spotlight how ISS ESG’s innovative methodologies can help assess a portfolio’s impact and natural capital dependencies.

In this paper, we use the transparency afforded by ETFs to analyze investor flows, but also look through to the underlying holdings, to understand the time-varying preferences of passive investors. We have found that year on year, there is a great deal of variability in style, industry and regional exposures. However, these exposure preferences tend to be neutral over longer time frames. This is in contrast to a consistent preference for performance, reflected by flows going towards ETFs with strong in-year returns.

Transaction costs play a crucial role for any investor considering adopting sustainable principles in their investments. This study from ISS LiquidMetrix and STOXX investigates the costs, and cost efficiencies, of shifting a benchmark portfolio of European equities to climate-transition versions.

Biodiversity is vital for our planet and society. With the emergence of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, investors are gaining a better understanding of biodiversity-linked risks and opportunities in their portfolios. This paper begins by exploring the current metrics available for assessing the biodiversity footprints of companies. It then describes the ISS STOXX framework for building biodiversity indices, based on three fundamental steps: “Avoid,” “Minimize,” and “Enable.”

This article provides a high-level refresher of what tracking error means, and how we can embed it directly into portfolio construction.

Our analysis shows how an optimized sustainability index can decrease active risk and free up more of the risk budget to be allocated to the desired sustainability metric(s), making the resulting portfolio a suitable replacement for a traditional benchmark.

Throughout 2022 and into 2023, the EM gauge has shown lower forecast and realized volatility than the global DM benchmark. A new whitepaper investigates the drivers of this anomaly.