Composition of Indexes

InvestInPoker

Hi,

I have been wondering how to find out the complete composition of some of the MSCI indexes. It seems very easy to find the "Top 10 holdings" but I cannot find the complete listing anywhere for the vast majority of these things.

For example, Take MSCI Japan

Top 10 holdings easily found here

(As a new user im not allowed to post the link, but its easily found from a google search the msci resource on the index)


But can I find the rest out? For the life of me I cannot - are they published anywhere? Even the various trackers that track this index seem to only publish the top 10 holdings and not much else.

Same seems to apply to the majority of actively managed funds I have looked at as well?

Cheers.

bowlhead99

The full data is relatively difficult to come by because although you may hear in the news that company A or company B has been promoted or demoted from the index, and you can go and see for yourself what a company's market cap is by multiplying the price by the number of issued shares (or by getting the figure from Google Finance or Reuters or ADVFN or whatever, it doesn't give you a full ranking. Often you would need to licence that data for real money.

There are some 'unofficial' guides that people maintain and keep relatively up to date online - for example, I refer to http://www.stockchallenge.co.uk/ftse.php from time to time for UK stocks, but accept it's not always perfect and if I really needed to check individual items I would go and corroborate it with something else.

FTSE publish lists of their index constituents on their website for personal use - example go here: https://www.ftse.com/Indices/UK_Indices/Constituents.jsp and it will tell you what company is in what UK index.

Or if you go here: https://www.ftse.com/Indices/FTSE_All_World_Index_Series/Constituents_and_Weights.jsp you can click through to a table here http://www.ftse.com/Analytics/factsheets/Home/DownloadConstituentsWeights/?indexdetails=AWORLDS

That would tell you that Apple Inc is in the All-World index and that it's 1.47% of the total index, like you could already get from the top 10, but you'll also see the other few thousand constituents. The limitation is that they don't update this in real time but knowing the June figure as per that report is bound to be good enough for you if you're already willing to trust your investment to an index.

If MSCI don't give out their data for free I'm sure you could ask them for a licence and pay them, and then you could get the same info that a fund manager would have while running their own index tracker fund.

If you are looking at individual funds, they typically update factsheets once a month with the top 10 and then once or twice a year there will be an interim or final report, containing the extended list of holdings. They usually have a condensed manager report and an extended manager report and a full set of financial statements so you just need to get the report that you want from the fund manager.

If you flick through this one (link from trustnet.com, a good resource for funds) you will find the sort of thing you're looking for starting page 8 of the report (page 10 of the pdf):
http://www.trustnet.com/PDFAd.aspx?url=http%3a%2f%2fdocuments.financialexpress.net%2fLiterature%2f9808432.pdf%3ffundCode%3dHIUKSC%26univ%3dO

Enjoy

InvestInPoker

As always bowlhead, a great response. Thanks.