News category: Sponsored Articles

The last two years have been a period of reflection and innovation for many businesses and sectors. The pandemic accelerated digital innovation and reshaped industries to better adapt to a new future. Geopolitical uncertainties in the first quarter of this year have further caused investors to consider how they will balance short term financial goals with longer term ones.

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Trading in equities and options has continued to rise at a strong pace globally, with both institutional and retail investors driving market volume to varying degrees. The latter is largely due to increased accessibility to electronic brokers and analyst research, adoption of zero-commission trading and intense pressure on bid-ask spreads.

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The specter of future inflation is prompting investors to seek inflation protection strategies. Premialab decomposes a CPI index to identify tradable proxies and test the efficacy of a passive commodities portfolio, as well as assessing actively managed commodity strategies to improve the risk adjusted performance of the tradable CPI commodity proxy portfolio.

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In the last 18 months or so we’ve seen a convergence of commercial models, technology and investor appetite that have further driven high investment volumes and volatility in the markets, not just on the equity investing side but derivatives trading as well.

According to a study by FIA, global futures and options trading reached 28.9 billion contracts in the first half of 2021, up 32.1% compared to the first half of 2020. The biggest contributor to this surge was equity markets with trading volume of single stock futures and options soaring 72.5%, and equity index futures and options volume rising 32%.

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In 2020 BNP Paribas Global Markets officially launched Brio – a premium global equities digital platform allowing hedge funds, asset managers and the wider institutional investment community access to analytics, indices, custom strategies and research, among other tools, in one platform. Renaud Meary, global head of equity derivatives institutional sales, Emmanuel Dray, global head of equity derivatives flow sales and Geoffrey Rodrigue, global head of equity derivatives business transformation, discuss in this article how Brio caters to the demands and addresses the challenges of modern portfolio managers and their evolving requirements.

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Eurex has grown its market share in the MSCI Asia underlying contracts this year to around 80% from 54% last year. Mezhgan Qabool, head of market development and equity and index sales in the APAC for Eurex, highlighted MSCI EM Asia as the biggest contract being traded with the highest interest from global investors. Other popular contracts include MSCI Japan, Australia, India, China Free and Taiwan.

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A characteristic of VOLQ relative to VIX is a seasonal factor that normally pushes VOLQ to relatively high levels compared to VIX during the four earnings months. The input used to calculate VOLQ is Nasdaq-100 (NDX) options and option implied volatility on the larger NDX components increases in anticipation of an earnings announcement. The following

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How should an investor approach portfolio protection? Constructing objectives, policies, strategies and implementations designed to mitigate downside risk is topical given the recency of the 2020 Q1 pandemic crash, today’s lofty equity markets, and thin fixed income yields.

In this article we conduct a simple exercise: build a hypothetical consensus protection portfolio using Premialab Pure Factors. Pure Factors, designed to track consensus performance across a wide range of indexed systematic strategies, provide the breadth, uniformity, and realism that can help investors explore and model with more power.

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As we approached August, market observers and commentators pointed to the danger that the months of August and September may hold for stocks. This line of thinking comes from recent history. Specifically, mid-month sell-offs in the 12% to 13% range for the Nasdaq-100 (NDX) in August 2011 and August 2015 along with a 10% sell-off

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In the college courses I teach there is often a focus on corporate governance. When I was an undergraduate, we would learn the phrase, “Increase shareholder value”, as the major reason a public company exists. Since my time as an undergrad, the phrase has been expanded to, “Increase shareholder value and do no harm”. This

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