State Street Institutional
Investor Indicators
Investment insights based on facts, not surveys

The State Street Institutional Investor Indicators provide investors, policymakers, and the public with insights into the aggregated and anonymized positioning, risk appetite, and portfolio carbon exposures of thousands of institutional investors around the world, representing trillions of dollars in assets.

State Street Institutional Investor
Risk Appetite Indicator

The Risk Appetite Indicator quantifies the degree to which the trading patterns of institutional investors are risk seeking or averse, on a scale of -100% (most risk averse) to 100% (most risk seeking).

Key Facts
  • The Institutional Investor Risk Appetite Indicator measures the buying and selling of risky assets across 22 dimensions of risk
  • These range across asset classes: equities, fixed-income, cash, and foreign exchange
  • Key dimensions include stock versus cash allocations, cyclical versus defensive equities, high-yield versus investment-grade corporate bonds, and US Dollar currency flows
  • Released monthly
Our latest report

Holdings

  • The State Street Holdings Indicators showed that long-term investor allocations to equities rose 33bps to 53.7%.
  • Cash holdings well a further 0.4 percentage points to 18.4%, this is the first time in tenth months that cash holdings are below their long-term average.
  • Fixed income holdings were left largely unchanged after their sharp rise last month.

RiskAppetite

  • The State Street Risk Appetite Index bounced back to 0.09 in May revealing a modest risk on bias across the month.
  • Within this moderate risk on environment long-term investors began to reassess their USD overweight once again.
  • Long-term investors rediscovered their appetite for higher yielding FX and fixed income instruments in May.
Risk Appetite