BOSTON (dpa-AFX) – According to a survey by asset manager State Street in March, the mood among equity investors worldwide has brightened somewhat. The Global Investor Confidence Index (ICI) rose 3.8 points to 81.4 points in the month ended, State Street experts said on Wednesday. The mood barometer is still below the neutral 100 point mark.
The slight increase in the global ICI is mainly due to the increasingly positive investor sentiment in Europe. The corresponding sub-index rose by 11 points to 117.5 points. The North American ICI edged up 0.9 points to 73.9 points, while the Asia ICI fell 6.3 points to 91.9 points.
For the first time in several months, investor sentiment around the world clouded over in October last year and in December fell to its lowest level since the outbreak of the 2020 corona pandemic. Since then, overall, things have been slowly improving again.
“While overall sentiment remained subdued, it is important to note that investor confidence did not deteriorate any further in March, actually picking up slightly,” commented Rajeev Bhargava, head of investor behavior research at State Street Associates. Because of the turbulence in the US banking sector, institutional investors continued to adopt a defensive stance, but they nevertheless showed “a certain degree of resilience” to the recent market fluctuations.
According to State Street, the ICI measures investor risk appetite by examining the actual buying and selling behavior of institutional investors. The index assigns precise meaning to changes in investor risk appetite: the higher the percentage spread across individual stocks, the greater the risk appetite, or confidence. A score of 100 is neutral – this is the level at which investors neither increase nor decrease their long-term exposure to risky assets./ck/bek/he