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Products November 25, 2008
MSCI Barra Adds to Islamic Indexes
MSCI Barra is expanding the MSCI Global Islamic Indexes family by extending the Emerging Markets coverage to include the Small Cap segment, and by adding coverage of 16 Frontier Markets countries.
Reported by Fred Schneyer
A news release said the change would increase the number of MSCI Islamic country indexes from 53 to 69. The resulting new indexes will include the MSCI Emerging Markets Islamic Investable Market Index and the MSCI Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries Islamic Investable Market Index.
“Demand for Islamic indexes continues to grow as Islamic investors look for ways to broaden their global exposure,” said Remy Briand, managing director and global head of Index Research at MSCI Barra, in the announcement. “The expansion of the MSCI Global Islamic Indexes to cover Emerging Markets Small Cap and Frontier Markets countries offers institutional investors deeper coverage of the Islamic investment opportunity set. As with all our indexes, our primary goals are to ensure that they continue to reflect the ever-changing global equity markets, and to provide our clients with relevant indexes which may be used for benchmarking and as the basis for index linked products.”
The calculation of the new indexes will start Wednesday. The indexes will be added to the MSCI Equity Index products December 2.
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