News & Research

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.

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.”

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.

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.

In this paper, our goal is to show how sustainability ETF exposures to a number of sustainability-related factors may vary. It is eminently clear to us that investors with a view about key sustainability features cannot rely on the fund name, but instead need to do more digging into whether their fund meets the required criteria.

Real estate has long had the reputation of being at least a partial hedge against inflation, since both rental income and property values typically respond positively to inflationary pressures. The iSTOXX Developed and Emerging Markets ex USA PK VN Index has lived up to this reputation historically and is continuing to do so in the current inflationary environment.

The STOXX WTW Climate Transition Indices are a new approach to managing climate risk that offer investors a systematic and transparent way to incorporate climate transition risk into their investment decisions.

This paper focuses on creating SDG portfolios that maximize exposure to one, two or all SDGs. The study shows that it is quite possible to create a portfolio that significantly improves the exposure to SDGs without taking on too much active risk. An optimizer can help manage that active risk.

The list of sustainable investment (SI) frameworks guiding portfolio design is long and keeps growing. Rarely a day goes by without intense discussion of some or all of them, and their often-conflicting implications for fund design. The authors of this paper aim to contribute towards this intensifying debate by examining in detail (as of October 2021) the criteria used in the 12 most important European pieces of legislation, country-specific fund labels and other standards guiding SI product design.

This is the second in a series of Qontigo and Clarity AI research papers, which focuses on the challenge of measuring impact as a key means of bridging the gap between impact investment theory and practice.