Infostream - Datastream Extranet

CONTENT ENHANCEMENT
Equity Indices – December 2006
Infostream January/February 2007
This month sees a crop of new indices – beginning with the release of the Hedge Fund Research indices
from HFR, which are well established in the marketplace. The MSCI Hedge Invest indices are also
available – these indices are designed to be investable and to reflect the overall structure and
composition of the hedge fund universe. From FTSE, new UK Commercial Property indices are available,
which are focused on the performance of investable and institutional grade commercial property in the
UK. New value and growth indices are available for both the S&P/Citigroup and S&P/IFCI index families.
Additional constituent list datatypes are available for New Zealand and Singapore equity indices.
Read on for the details and lots more indices!
Global News
Hedge Fund Research Indices
There is increasing interest in the hedge fund market as the industry becomes more regulated, and over the years the market participants
have released a number of indices which are already available on Datastream. These include indices from MSCI, FTSE, S&P as well as
Hennessee and CSFB/Tremont. They are now complemented by the addition of the HFR index family – these indices are well established
and regarded as one of the main benchmarks. HFR provides a range of daily and monthly indices covering different strategies –
convertible arbitrage, distressed plus currency indices – and history is available back to 1990 for some indices.
The HFRX daily indices currently consist of eight single-strategy indices, an asset-weighted Global Hedge Fund Index and the HFRX Equal
Weighted Strategies Index. The HFRX Global Hedge Fund and Global Strategies indices are calculated in five currencies (US dollar, Swiss
franc, euro, sterling and yen) and the earliest history is available from 31 March 2003.
The HFRI monthly indices are equally weighted performance indices, utilised by numerous hedge fund managers as a benchmark for their
own hedge funds. The HFRI are broken down into 37 categories by strategy, including the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite, which accounts
for over 1,800 funds listed on the internal HFR database. The earliest history is available from 31 January 1990 for monthly indices.
The daily indices are updated at 3am GMT with a two-day lag, eg data for Monday is provided on Wednesday.
The monthly indices are updated on the fifth business day of each month.
Information on the methodology used is available from www.hedgefundresearch.com
© Thomson Financial Limited 2007 9