The Qontigo Investment Intelligence Summit held on May 5 was the stage for a discussion around index-based thematic investing. Two industry experts – from BlackRock and Qontigo – explained why assets are flowing into thematics and why the strategies can best target the upside of a world undergoing structural change.

Dividend strategies have gained a foothold with market participants seeking potential outperformance and attractive yields, especially in the low-rate environment since the 2008 financial crisis. While traditional high dividend payers have performed strongly in recent years, they have become quite expensive by most valuation…

S&P Dow Jones Indices offers some thoughts about the changing nature of work, and has launched the S&P Kensho Enterprise Index, which tracks companies involved in the enterprise collaberation market. These companies tend to be involved in the main services and technology offering, including collaboration software and…

Cross-border investment in non-listed real estate is on the rise. This article aims to compare the U.S. NFI-ODCE index with the European INREV ODCE index and the recently released Asian ANREV ODCE index with the hope that this study will be helpful to cross-border investors in these major markets.

In the 20 years ending in 2020, 94% of all large-cap U.S. managers lagged the S&P 500. Mid- and small-cap results were almost equally disappointing. A notable consequence of these shortfalls in active performance has been the rise in passive investing, one of the most significant trends in modern financial history. S…

The rise of environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) investing is evident in market growth and the advent of even easier, and cheaper, ESG investment options available through indexing and ETFs. This paper establishes a descriptive account of the ESG investment landscape drawn from hand-collected 2018-2019 data on a…

Investors are becoming less satisfied with broad based investments. Instead, they are increasingly looking for investment vehicles that cater to a narrower, more focused investment thesis to better express their own investment views specially as tactical asset allocation.

China’s arrival in global indexes changes the nature of the asset allocation decision for global investors benchmarked against them. Investors may now need reasons to justify not investing strategically in Chinese government bonds, rather than a justification for doing so tactically when they were not included in benchmark…

Index funds, which did not exist 50 years ago, now play a prominent role in global financial markets. The growth of indexing was driven by the failure of active managers, in aggregate, to outperform passive benchmarks. This failure is not a new development — it was reported as long ago as the 1930s. The rise of passive…