MSCI Shares Plunge as Trading Volume Plummets to 431st Rank Amid Index Overhaul

On August 7, 2025, MSCI (NYSE: MSCI) closed with a 0.51% decline, marking its lowest volume in recent sessions at $270 million—a 53.37% drop from the previous day. The stock ranked 431st in trading activity among listed equities, reflecting reduced short-term investor engagement ahead of key index adjustments.

MSCI announced its August 2025 Index Review, with revisions set to take effect on August 26. The MSCI ACWI Index will add 42 securities and remove 56, including notable additions like Rocket Lab, SoFi Technologies, and Affirm Holdings in developed markets. Emerging markets will see China CITIC Bank, Dian Swastatika Sentosa, and Laopu Gold included. Frontier markets will add nine stocks, such as Vietnam’s FPT Corp and Oman’s Asyad Shipping, but Bangladesh-related securities remain excluded due to ongoing accessibility challenges. These changes highlight MSCI’s ongoing efforts to align its indexes with evolving market dynamics and liquidity patterns.

The index adjustments underscore MSCI’s focus on market capitalization-weighted rebalancing, which can influence institutional portfolio allocations and tracking fund flows. However, the decision to omit Bangladesh securities reflects persistent structural barriers in frontier markets, limiting the firm’s ability to enforce uniform revisions across all regions. The absence of high-profile additions in the US or China may temper near-term demand for MSCI’s index-linked products, though long-term tracking of global equity exposure remains a core driver for the company’s revenue.

A backtested strategy of purchasing the top 500 stocks by daily trading volume and holding them for one day generated a 166.71% return from 2022 to the present, significantly outperforming the benchmark’s 29.18%. This highlights the potential of liquidity concentration in high-volume equities to drive short-term gains, particularly in volatile markets. However, such strategies carry elevated risks and require careful risk management to avoid overexposure to transient market movements.