Financial benchmarking giant MSCI is working on an “ultimate index” tracking the performance of all markets, which could mark 

The quest for the investment Holy Grail — an index of everything

submited by
Style Pass
2021-07-13 15:00:04

Financial benchmarking giant MSCI is working on an “ultimate index” tracking the performance of all markets, which could mark the culmination of half a century of academic theory and practical financial engineering.

Indexing is a booming business, slicing markets up into geographies or categories such as equities or bonds, and then subdividing further by size or industry. These are then used as benchmarks for fund managers, or packaged up into investable products. But a way to combine everything from commodities to venture capital in one gauge has proven elusive.

“It’s the holy grail,” says Mark Makepeace, the head of index provider Wilshire. “It solves a core problem of investing and would be hugely beneficial.”

When Makepeace led FTSE Russell, the group teamed up with Nobel laureate and Stanford economics professor William Sharpe to create an adaptive asset-allocation tool that started to tackle the idea of an ultimate index, but included only stocks and bonds. 

Leave a Comment