What’s new in investments and funds? – MSCI

The latest news about investment offers, financial products and other services for wealth advisors and their clients.

MSCI
MSCI, a provider of investment indices, has launched MSCI Private Capital Indexes. These indices record returns and other data from global markets. This is an increasingly interesting area of ​​interest for asset managers and other investors.

These 130 indices cover private equity, private credit, private real estate, private infrastructure and private natural resources and complement the more than 80 existing MSCI real estate fund and real estate indices.

In this publication, MSCI was asked about the meaning of the new indices.

“Leveraging MSCI’s transparent methodologies and reputation for rigorously verified data, the indices are composed of a broad universe of private capital funds with over $11 trillion in capitalization,” said Charissa Smith, Co-Head of Private Assets at MSCI. “Institutional investors are increasingly looking to private assets to help meet their investment mandates. In the asset space, this trend underscores the need for education and democratization of private assets.”

“The growth in their private asset allocations is driving demand for transparency, insights and analytics. MSCI’s client base of asset owners, asset managers, banks, asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies and others therefore has a growing need for private asset insights, standards and decision tools. The indices are designed to help inform asset allocation across asset classes and individual managers, to benchmark your (their) performance against the broader market and against peer groups, and to assist in meeting commitments based on stakeholders’ strategic goals,” Smith continued.

“These indices provide a panoramic view of private equity investments because they are constructed from a fully LP-based dataset enriched with MSCI’s research-based insights. Transactions are sourced from limited partners’ clients, with additional data collected on an ongoing basis from original source documents provided by managers,” Smith said. “This is uniformly classified and audited, and supplemented with extensive research. Only funds with a full history to date and accurate daily cash flow history are included. The dataset effectively represents the opportunity set of private equity investments in an unbiased manner because it is sourced exclusively from limited partners around the world who rely on MSCI’s data and analytics services to manage their private equity portfolios. No data is obtained through voluntary submissions of manager data, web scraping or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests,” Smith said.

Who are these indices intended for?

“Institutional investors can use these indices for policy benchmarking, strategic asset allocation and to help achieve long-term financial goals. The indices enable MSCI’s broad client base to gain insight into recent quarterly returns and historical, net-of-cost investment performance across the broad universe of closed-end private capital fund indices, including private equity, private credit, private real assets and funds of funds,” Smith added.