Advocacy

The Index Industry Association (IIA) submitted a response to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (Commission) request for comment on “Certain Information Providers Acting as Investment Advisers” (Comment Request). In the response, the IIA noted that it does not agree with the Commission’s suggestion to regulate index providers as investment advisers under the Advisers Act…

Last week, the IIA responded to the European Commission’s consultation on the functioning of the third-country regime under the Benchmark Regulation (BMR). The consultation is meant to seek views on whether the current provision of third-country benchmarks to EU end-users is functioning properly, and to collect data to demonstrate whether the current framework should be amended.…

The Benchmarks Regulation introduces a regime for benchmark administrators that ensures the accuracy and integrity of benchmarks. ESMA developed draft regulatory technical standards (RTS) and implementing technical standards (ITS) on a large number of areas, and also provided the Commission with Technical Advice. ESMA coordinates the supervision of benchmark administrators by national competent authorities. For…

The IOSCO (International Organization of Securities Commissioners) Task Force on Financial Market Benchmarks Consultation Report is an important milestone in the global response to recent investigations and enforcement actions against attempted manipulation of certain benchmarks. IIA shares the Task Force’s commitment to the development of benchmarks with high levels of transparency and integrity. Click to…

The Index Industry Association (IIA), an independent, not-for-profit organization composed of leading global independent index administrators, has commented on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) proposed rule regarding Tailored Shareholder Reports. In the response, the full text of which can be found here, the IIA supports the SEC Proposed Rule which requires funds to disclose…

What is an index? • A financial index measures the performance of a list of instruments (bonds, stocks, etc.) that are selected and weighted according to an employed methodology that describes a set of rules governing the construction of the index. • IIA defines an index “as a number calculated by reference to a theoretical…

By Andrew Clare & Steve Thomas, Cass Business School, City University London While the advent of the modern stock market index is usually traced to the creation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896, it was the pioneering asset pricing work some 60 years later of Harry Markowitz1 who introduced Modern Portfolio Theory in…

By The Committee for Economic Development (CED) Financial indices are designed to provide investors with a way to reduce the complexity and increase the comprehensibility of financial markets – and yet, indices themselves are largely misunderstood. Indices are also commonly confused or conflated with index funds. Somewhat ironically, indices enable an abbreviated lexicon that is…

By Rolf Agather, Managing Director of Research, North America, FTSE Russell The findings of our latest annual global survey of smart beta usage by asset owners (with a collective AUM of over $5 trillion), suggests that smart beta is now a standard tool in investors’ armories. For the first time, we found that the majority…

Index Industry Association (IIA), a global organization of index administrators, today announced the results of a revealing new survey of its fourteen member firms that quantifies the total number of indexes available globally for the first time ever. According to the survey, there are 3.288 million indexes globally with equity indexes representing over 95 percent…