Expanding our index universe to all global equities and ETFs

Expanding our index universe

We’re excited to announce one of the biggest (if not the biggest) updates to the Thematic product - now you can add all global equities to an index, as well as ETFs. We now support 40,000 companies listed on 110 exchanges across 81 countries. Anyone can create thematic indices with global representation, global market indices, regional indices, and track international investments.

We also include over 8,000 ETFs in our universe. This gives you the ability to create “funds of funds” indexes with greater diversification, exposure to different asset classes (such as fixed income), and trading strategies (for example, 3x levered ETFs).

All of this is available to you today, for free, in the Index Builder. Take it for a spin!

Upgrading our data

How did we 8x our universe of securities? Over the course of several months, we put all of the financial data providers through a rigorous evaluation process, checking each for how they handled and reported on rare corporate actions and events. We evaluated their technology, their methods for delivering data for reliability and cleanliness. Finally we evaluated each on economics, which provider gave us the best combo of features and technology for the price. At the end, FactSet was selected based on this rubrik. They weren’t the cheapest, or the most fully-featured provider, but they won out on “giving a sh*t,” putting the most care and diligence (in our opinion) in proactively solving for data quality and integrating into their product.

We completed the FactSet integration in Q2 of this year, which put us in a position to expand from US only to all global equities.

As a part of the integration process, we also created a flexible data model and abstraction layer to make it easy for us to integrate new data sources, including custom ones! If you’re interested in importing your own data for experimentation and building indices, let us know.

Building an index with global equities and ETFs

Choosing from 48,000 companies and ETFs to find the right holdings for your index is a challenge inof itself, so we’ve upgraded our Index Builder to make the experience enjoyable and intuitive.

The best way to start is via Search - enter the name of the company or the symbol. You can search individually or separate searches by a comma. All the results will appear in the Results area below.

Under the Filters section, you can choose Companies, ETFs, or both, to expand or restrict the universe to search from. (Crypto is there too, more on that soon!)

Another method is to Filter. In this example we’re using filters on their own, finding all companies and ETFs that are in the Communications Sector, listed in Europe, and have a market capitalization greater than $10b USD:

You can use also Filters on their own, or combine Search and Filters for even more precision.

For multinational companies that are listed on multiple exchanges, we chose the listings with the greatest trading volume for that listing. If you’re looking to use a specific listing for a company, and don’t want to use the default we’ve chosen, please let us know. Also, if there’s a specific company you’re looking for that isn’t showing up, drop us a line so we can look into it: hello@gothematic.com.

Happy building!

We hope you find this product update valuable. Expansion to global equities was by far our most requested feature, and we’re excited to see what products are built going forward. In the coming weeks we’ll be dogfooding our own product and adding to our family of Thematic Benchmarks with versions of well-known international benchmarks, such as the MSCI EAFE, the S&P International 700, the STOXX 600, and others. We always welcome the gift of your feedback - feel free to reach out at our email hello@gothematic.com or on Twitter (X?) at @go_thematic.