While global inflation has accelerated over the last few months, the expectation for some countries is that inflation has peaked while others anticipate further increases.

Industry and revenue lenses can provide additional insights to investors beyond a traditional sector analysis.

Inflation in the U.S. has accelerated over the last 18 months to a high of 8.5% in March (8.3% in April), a level that was last observed in the early 1970s.

Looking at sectors through a factor lens may provide additional insights for investors in terms of explaining performance.

Along with other factors, comparing current sector valuations to longer-term averages has helped investors as they make decisions about whether to rotate in or out of specific sectors.

Our research has shown that an industry momentum approach, which involves investing in industries with the best recent performance, outperformed broad-market equity indexes in developed-market regions from 2000 to 2021.

When considering new sector exposures in their portfolios, investors can review correlations between existing and potential allocations to better understand whether these sectors’ returns moved in the same direction or if exhibited a differentiated return pattern. 

U.S. Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell, has made it official: We can no longer label the period of current inflation as transitory. 

When investors construct portfolios, they may do so based purely on bottom-up stock selection, or they may incorporate an element of top-down construction by adjusting the portfolio’s allocation to sectors, countries or factors.

Having a better understanding of the ownership structure of a firm and the various ownership control groups that may exist, can help international investors assess how loud their voices will be when the firm’s strategy and direction is being decided.

The holiday season may only exacerbate supply-chain challenges affecting the availability and prices of goods. In this inaugural edition of Spotlight on the Markets, we analyze performance and how investors are working to rise to the occasion.

Although, on average, emerging-market (EM) companies have tended to have lower MSCI ESG Ratings than global peers, a more granular regional analysis can provide additional insights.

The drivers of Latin America’s economies have significantly changed over the past two decades, as we can see clearly by looking at the sector composition of the Latin American stock market.  

Through time, many investors have shown a preference for their home markets. 

In our previous post, we analyzed the performance of the MSCI EM Latin America Investable Market Index (IMI) relative to other emerging-market regions. Here, we investigate what drove this performance.

Latin American stock markets have recovered strongly as the world starts to overcome some of the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges — renewing interest in the region.

Small caps are usually thought of as having a greater carbon footprint relative to their larger counterparts. 

As more investors incorporate ESG considerations into their investment decisions, some companies have changed their behavior, which has led to changes in their ESG profiles.

Market sentiment isn’t static, and we have seen that recently with the gradual reopening of the economy and its impact on the performance of small-cap companies.

Another way to deepen our understanding of small-cap stocks is to look at them through a style-factor lens. 

Despite the potential benefits of investing in small-cap stocks, investors often worry about liquidity, ease and ability to trade, at the lower end of the market-cap spectrum; specifically, costs and access.

A few weeks ago, we looked at the historical and current concentration of a range of regional indexes and noted there had been an increase in concentration across the globe. 

The volume of world merchandise trade fell by 5.3% in 2020, while travel services were down by 63%, according to estimates by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, the WTO expects recovery from the pandemic’s effects to be swift, with regional differences, and world merchandise trade volume to increase by 8.0% in 2021. But even before the pandemic, global trade had shown signs of slowing, and the growth trend appeared to be flattening. There were several reasons, from increased...

When investors are considering adding new types of investments to their portfolios, they examine not only the risk and return profiles of those new allocations, but also whether they might add diversification benefits.

We recently looked at small caps through the lens of historical performance during economic recovery. 

As the world economy starts to feel the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines, some investors have started to revisit the role of small-cap stocks in their portfolios.