The latest news in investment offerings, financial products and other services relative to wealth advisors and their clients.

MSCI
MSCI, which provides investment indices, has launched MSCI Private Capital Indexes, which capture returns and other data from global markets, a rising area of interest for wealth managers and other investors.

Covering private equity, private credit, private real estate, private infrastructure, and private natural resources, these 130 Indexes complement MSCI’s over 80 existing real asset fund and property indexes.

This publication asked MSCI about the significance of the new indices.

“Leveraging MSCI's transparent methodologies and reputation for rigorously verified data, the indexes are constructed from a broad universe of private capital funds with over $11 trillion in capitalisation," Charissa Smith, co-head of Private Assets at MSCI, said. "Institutional investors are increasingly looking to private assets to help meet their investment mandates. In the wealth space, this trend underscores the need for education and democratisation of private assets."

"The growth in their private asset allocations increases demand for transparency, insights and analytics. MSCI’s client base of asset owners, asset managers, banks, wealth managers, hedge funds, insurance firms and others therefore have growing needs for private asset insights, standards, and decision tools. The indexes are designed to help inform asset allocation to asset classes and individual managers, compare your [their] performance against the broader market and against peer groups, and assist in meeting obligations based on the strategic goals of stakeholders," Smith continued. 

"These indexes provide a panoramic view of private capital investments, as they are constructed from a dataset that is entirely LP-sourced and MSCI-enriched with research-based insights. Transactions are sourced through limited partner clients, with supplemental data being continuously gathered from original source documents provided by managers," Smith said. "This is uniformly classified and checked, and augmented with extensive research. Only funds with complete inception to date history and daily cash flow precision history are included. The dataset effectively represents the opportunity set of private capital investments in an unbiased way because it is sourced solely from limited partners around the world who rely on MSCI’s data and analytics services to manage their private capital portfolios. No data is sourced via voluntary manager data submissions, web scraping, or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests,” Smith said.

Who are these indices aimed at?

“Institutional investors can leverage these indexes for policy benchmarking, strategic asset allocation, and to help achieve long-term financial goals. The indexes enable MSCI’s broad range of clients to understand the recent quarterly returns and historical, net-of-fees investment performance in the indexes’ extensive universe of closed-end private capital funds, covering private equity, private credit, private real assets, and funds of funds," Smith added.