MSCI Barra has launched MSCI Global Currency Indices and Short & Leveraged Indices, two components of the MSCI Thematic & Strategy Indices family, which are intended to be used as underlying for structured products and other index-linked investment vehicles, as well as in portfolio management and benchmarking.
The currency indices reflect the performance of the currency and interest rate returns of developed and emerging market currencies in regional or composite MSCI equity indices, with the weights of each currency reflecting the country weight of the relevant MSCI equity index. Product providers can thus also construct products based on the relationship between the two elements.
“MSCI Barra is committed to providing innovative indices that reflect the performance of the opportunity set for particular investment themes or strategies,” said chief operating officer David Brierwood.
The Short & Leveraged Indices aim to reflect the investment process of managers that employ short and leveraged trading strategies by taking into account the main performance components, capital gains, cash dividends and interest. They incorporate stock borrowing costs.
“There is growing interest from leading investors who want to slice and dice the equity universe into long term investment themes,” said Brierwood. “Our aim is to provide institutional investors with a global and consistently constructed index family, designed to support their analytical processes and which can also be used as the basis of index-linked products.”
