In September 2014, a week before the UN Climate Summit, MSCI launched an innovative family of indices designed to allow investors to manage carbon risk in their portfolio. The MSCI Low Carbon Indices were developed at the request of, and with critical insight from two pension funds - AP4 of Sweden and FRR in France - which committed €2 billion, and Amundi, Europe's largest asset manager, which licensed the indices in order to offer low carbon funds (index mutual funds, ETFs) to other investors.
In June 2017, Barry Callebaut, the largest B2B cocoa and chocolate company in the world renewed its revolving credit facility (RCF) introducing a novel feature suggested by the Dutch bank ING: the margin on the RCF would be tied to the company's ESG score from Sustainalytics, a leading sustainability agency, as a way to "make sustainability truly pay". A year later, Barry Callebaut has made progress towards the ambitious environmental and social goals of its Forever Chocolate programme, yet its ESG score has fallen almost to the level where the margin on the RCF will increase.
Case A: To extract cheap volatility in Duke Energy convertible bonds, Mark Punt, a convertible arbitrageur at KBC AIM, purchases the bonds and delta hedges them with a short position in the company's shares. To manage the credit risk of his long convertible bond position, Mark faces a choice of hedging with CDS, shares of the company or out-of-the-money puts on the company's stock. Key to his hedging strategy is an understanding of the observed negative correlation between credit spreads and share prices for Duke Energy.
Case B: Based on a Merton-type structural model of credit risk, Steve Dash, a trader at KBC AIM, perceives that British Airways'CDS are mispriced relative to the company's share price. Steve has to figure out which trades to put on to exploit the potential mispricing and what the main profit drivers of this strategy are. At the same time, he needs to be aware of the risks of his strategy and whether the "mispricing" could be attributable to factors that his capital structure arbitrage model isn't able to capture.