JPMorgan to launch umbrella bond index covering all sectors

By Abhinav Ramnarayan

LONDON (Reuters) - JPMorgan will launch a new overall bond index on Thursday that will unify all of the bank's flagship bond indexes that cater to specific areas such as government bonds and emerging markets, according to a document seen by Reuters on Thursday.

The JPMorgan Global Aggregate Bond Index (GABI) will integrate indexes such as the Emerging Markets Bonds Index (EMBI), the Government Bond Index (GBI) and the Collateralized Loan Obligation (CLOI) index.

The new GABI index will comprise over 22,000 securities from 122 countries across 31 currencies with a combined market capitalisation of $44.5 trillion.

Investors will be able to break this down further by credit ratings, market classification such as developed or emerging markets, geographical region, country, maturity, currency, and, if applicable, corporate sector.

The bank will become one of only a handful of providers to offer an umbrella index of this nature, it said.

"Many investment banks have divested their index business and sold to data firms or exchanges, but this demonstrates that JPMorgan is fully committed to strengthening its index franchise," a spokesman for the bank told Reuters.

(Reporting by Abhinav Ramnarayan, Editing by Karin Strohecker and Adrian Croft)