Data

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Investics Signal

Do you believe that some investment managers have more skill than others and those who consistently demonstrate skill have a higher likelihood of outperforming others going forward?

Investics Signal (formerly called Investics Manager Evaluation Analytics - iMEA) offers instant access to over 24,000 share classes across 9,000 US registered funds, 700 fund managers and 160 peer groups to provide a forward looking excess return due to skill (vs. luck). The methodology originally emanated from a research mandate of one of the world's largest retirement funds to construct a completely algorithmic approach for determining investment manager skill in order to identify investment management firms and funds to engage. This same methodology was also famously utilized to initially and independently help determine that something was very amiss with the Bernie Madoff funds. Investics Signal is the commercialization of that methodology into a now broadly available online service.

Investics Signal utilizes a cumulative sum methodology with returns based style analysis and a Bayesian framework for analyzing past excess returns to detect whether the quality of a fund's investment management process is normal, improving or deteriorating and provides the annual return magnitude that a fund management’s process is expected to out (or under) perform on average other similar funds due to manager skill. This value is based on the extent to which the most relevant period of past performance appears to have arisen from a combination of skill and luck. From there a rating is determined in the form of an emoji and visualized for immediate and simple interpretation of the level of skill:

🏆 Top - 🥰 Joy - 🙂 Happy - 🤨 Neutral - 🙁 Sad - 😓 Worry - 👎 Bottom

Four pillars of evaluation (performance, process, objective and skill) provide additional insight into the overall fund management process.

Artificial intelligence machine learning methods are used to provide forward-looking skill forecasts, accompanied with computer auto-generated analysis narration.

Free trials and access are available by clicking here, with paid subscriptions starting at $250 here.

Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG)

Investics provides a normalized suite of multiple ESG providers data sets. Chose one provider or more to compare, contrast, validate and analyze. Data from Arabesque, IdealRatings and MSCI are available for subscription through the Investics DARTS data marketplace on AWS Data Exchange and can be automatically and seamlessly integrated into the Investics Cloud Ecosystem (ICE) for both standard and customized analytics. Existing subscriptions with any particular ESG data vendor are honored.

To see a list of publicly available Investics DARTS offerings available on AWS Marketplace please click here.

Portfolio Holdings & Transactions

The Investics DARTS Portfolio Holdings and Transaction service provides daily or monthly delivery of institutional portfolios held or accounted for at financial institutions including custodians, fund administrators and investment managers. This service requires authorization from the owner of the portfolio(s), as well as a subscription to Investics Cloud Ecosystem (ICE).

This service provides the rich detail that a financial institution is able to provide, including portfolio name, holdings date, security identifier(s), security name, units held, share status, asset classification, price, market value and supporting transactions, to name a few. Data is normalized across different financial institution sources in order to process/analyze portfolios consistently. Portfolio data is delivered securely and exclusively through the Investics Cloud Ecosystem (ICE) with all data encrypted at transit and rest.

To see a list of publicly available Investics DARTS offerings available on AWS Marketplace please click here.

Investment Benchmarks

Investics provides access to and analytics on its own proprietary Investics Signal Threshold Benchmarks© as well a number of widely available industry standard benchmark families.

By surveying over 24,000 US registered funds, the Investics Signal Threshold Benchmarks© provide monthly performance results by best fitting each fund into one of over 150 benchmarks across 4 major asset classes and 15 broad allocations. Thus creating comparable benchmarks of actual fund performance based on how funds behave, as opposed to what fund literature might declare. This helps enhance the analytical process by being able to calculate better aligned fund alphas which reflect the rest of the fund management industry actual performance of similar portfolios instead of market based benchmarks of holdings which can lead to tracking and timing issues, as well as potential false interpretation of investment manager skill.

With a large percentage of active fund managers underperforming their respective traditional market benchmarks over time, it may be that holdings constructed market benchmarks are not the most optimal (or certainly not the only) comparison to evaluate a fund manager’s performance. The iMEA Threshold Benchmarks provide an alternative approach to better calibrate alpha calculations against other precisely comparable funds’ actual results. This can also lead to better apples to apples performance comparison of similar objective funds, either passive, active, exchange traded or ESG. A limited data view of the new Investics Signal Threshold Benchmark service is available at: https://www.investics.net/benchmarks. with subscription information available by clicking here.

MSCI has been at the forefront of index construction and maintenance for more than 50 years, launching its first global equity indexes in 1969. They remain a market leader by expanding and enhancing index offerings to reflect the evolving and complex needs of the institutional investment community – with groundbreaking new products, innovative research, high quality data and dedicated client support.

Subscribers to this Investics DARTS offering are required to have subscriptions to at least one index module from MSCI and also to Investics Cloud Ecosystem (ICE). Upon subscription to this service, all the MSCI Indexes modules a user is subscribed to are automatically aggregated and seamlessly delivered through Investics ICE. This includes daily MSCI Indexes constituents, performance, index and security masters datasets.

Reference

A collection of supporting reference information for complementary use with other Investics DARTS and ICE analytics subscriptions or standalone for non-Investics use cases. Available reference subscriptions include:

Geopolitical - countries, capital cities, territories, state capitals, continents, longitude and latitudes, currencies & exchanges

FIGI Security Identifiers - universe of FIGI's and associated reference and classification data

Equity Security Master - prices, fundamentals and classifications,

Investment Manager Logos - universe of investment management firms corporate logos.

To see a list of publicly available Investics DARTS offerings available on AWS Marketplace please click here.