MSCI Barra (NYSE:MXB), a leading provider of investment decision support tools worldwide, including indices and portfolio risk and performance analytics, announced today that it has launched a new set of indices belonging to the MSCI Thematic & Strategy Indices family.
Based on the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®), the MSCI Agriculture & Food Chain Indices are designed to measure the opportunity set represented by listed companies across the agriculture and food chain.
The new indices include food distributors and producers of agricultural products, fertilizers & agricultural chemicals, and packaged foods & meats. As such, they provide a more relevant equity benchmark for fund managers, pension funds and other institutional investors following an equity-based agriculture and food chain strategy, and can be used for performance attribution, performance measurement, and manager evaluation. The indices may also serve as the basis of structured products and other index-linked investment vehicles such as ETFs.
“There is growing interest from leading investors who want to slice and dice the equity universe into long term investment themes. The MSCI Agriculture & Food Chain Indices join the recently launched MSCI Commodity Producers and MSCI Infrastructure Indices,” said David Brierwood, Chief Operating Officer, MSCI Barra. “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.”
A range of flagship indices for the MSCI Agriculture & Food Chain Indices is now available on request to eligible clients directly from MSCI Barra. The flagship indices will be added to the existing MSCI equity index products on or before the end of December, 2008. Additional indices can be calculated on client request. In addition to a free floatadjusted market capitalization weighting scheme, a sector capped version is also available for institutional investors who desire a more balanced sector distribution.
Index methodologies for all the new MSCI Thematic & Strategy Indices are available on the MSCI Barra website athttp://www.mscibarra.com/products/indices/thematic_and_strategy/
