Deutsche Boerse's index business Stoxx has set up a new series of indices to track the bond values of Europe's biggest companies, after launching its blue-chip corporate bond index last year. Stoxx is looking to build on its fixed-income index offering after launching, in April 2016, the Euro Stoxx 50 Corporate Bond Index - a fixed-income version of its well-known Euro Stoxx 50 equity index.
That was Stoxx's first bond index, and was designed to act as an underlying benchmark for index-tracking exchange-traded funds (ETFs), whose assets under management have ballooned in recent years as investors have sought easy access to a central bank-fueled bull market in bonds. In May the firm launched a series of multi-asset indices, ranging from 'high stability' to 'high growth', based on different weightings of equities and corporate bonds from the two flagship indices - again aimed at providing more focused benchmarks for ETFs and other funds to track.
Its new corporate bond sub-indices represent several maturity buckets, industry sectors and rating classes. The different versions allow investors to "more efficiently and accurately capture their fine-tuned views in European credit markets", helping them match desired strategies, Stoxx chief executive Matteo Andreetto said in a statement on Tuesday. The maturity buckets are: one to three years, three to five years, five to seven years, and over seven years.