Direct Indexing is the process of holding the stocks in the weights of the underlying Index, rather than buying an ETF that tracks an index, and this new opportunity is being adopted by financial heavyweight Charles Schwab and will be available to investors. Starting with the large-cap Schwab 1000 Index, S&P Small Cap 600 Index and MSCI KLD 400 Social Index, Schwab will be available to mix and match to customize a portfolio to hit the investor’s exact needs. However, this option won’t be available to just any investor. The indexing platform will require a $100,000 account size. Adoption of direct index investing is one piece of Schwab’s expansion into personal investing, that goes hand-in-hand with environmental, social, and governance investing and other thematic investing.

FINSUM: Schwab is the latest of Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley to jump into index investing. However Schwab’s pricing format is not revealed and its advantages over a low fee ETF are not yet clear.

The bond market boon has been bad for many fixed income investors, and debt is coming to term in a higher inflationary environment which is eating up all the return. However, bond market investors are turning to factor based investing to earn excess returns. Factor investing is a $700 billion market in equities, and it dwarfs the $25 billion dollar fixed income factor market. Factor investor modifies indices based on factors they think can give an edge over traditional indices. Active bond factor investing can outperform traditional indices in rising yield environments, but factor investing is looking to rival these active funds with systemic decisions. A ‘smart beta’ approach will look to outperform in high yield and emerging market debt.

FINSUM: The extensive literature on systemic fixed income is relatively small, and that's why smart beta strategies have failed to take off in the bond market like they have in equities.

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Markets were flummoxed early this week with the growing Omicron Covid-19 variant spreading rapidly in pockets globally. Despite these growing concerns and a seemingly endless pandemic, the JPMorgan is calling for a big 2022. With one of the absolute highest predictions on wall street JPMorgan is calling for a 5050 S&P 500 to end 2022. Easing supply chains, earrings growth and a more stable China are the key parts of their prediction for a successful equity market in 2022. Even if investors overweight China in their portfolios, the biggest threat will be domestically. A hawkish turn by the Fed would be detrimental to their prediction and is still the largest sort of risk in JPMorgans eyes.

FINSUM: Powell is talking tapering and rate rises just as Omicron is spreading which could be the perfect storm for a bad Q1 in 2022.

Goldman Sachs has a new platform for investors to assist in portfolio management. In a partnership with Amazon’s cloud division, GS is bringing data and software tools for software management to a cloud computing environment. The product will give investors access to aggregated data and GS expertise in investing. Additionally they hope to lower the barrier to entry for quantitative trading techniques and allow smaller firms to have access. The partnership came as a shock at how close both companies are to one another. This also adds another company to Amazon's growing list of cloud based partnerships which have had an incredibly high success rate. GS will monetize the platform and target it to hedge funds and other financial companies.

FINSUM: This products biggest benefit will be the clean data and accessibility, but a strong partnership like this could send regulation warning signs to Washington.