Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced today that it has launched three new MSCI Index futures contracts, including on the MSCI Japan ESG Select Leaders GTR Index. The other index futures contracts include the MSCI Japan NTR Index and MSCI USA Minimum Volatility GTR Index.

Trabue Bland, President of ICE Futures U.S., said:

“These new contracts build on our relationship with MSCI and highlight our commitment to offering customers a variety of ESG-related, country-specific index futures for benchmarking and managing risk.”

The new contracts, which began trading today, are listed on ICE Futures U.S. and five expiry months have been listed for each contract: December 2020, March 2021, June 2021, September 2021 and December 2021.

According to MSCI, the MSCI Japan ESG Select Leaders Index is a free float-adjusted market capitalization weighted index based on the MSCI Japan IMI Top 700 Index, its parent index, which includes large, mid and small-cap securities in the Japanese markets. The Index is designed to represent the performance of companies that have high Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance. The index aims to target sector weights that reflect the relative sector weights of MSCI Japan IMI Top 700 Index in order to limit the systematic risk introduced by the ESG selection process.