PARTNER CONTENT
Joy Yang, Head of Product Management and Marketing at MarketVector IndexesTM, winner of Index Provider of the Year at the 2025 Hedgeweek European Awards, shares how the firm meets rising demand from European managers for digital asset and thematic indexing solutions.
MarketVector delivers institutional-grade indexes, data, and index services for traditional and digital assets. As an ESMA-regulated benchmark administrator, we empower hedge fund managers with transparent, high-quality, and innovative index solutions covering equity, and crypto to support alpha generation, risk management, and product differentiation across diverse strategies and geographies.
What three differentiators of your business have most contributed to your success?
First, we bring an experienced, research-led approach to index design, focusing on liquidity, cost efficiency, and investability. Our indexes are built not just for tracking, but for trading, ensuring that hedge funds and market makers can execute with minimal slippage.
Second, we lead in cross-asset innovation. MarketVector is behind some of Europe’s most traded and well-known ETFs in their thematic categories, including semiconductors, junior gold miners, e-sports, and defence, each offering high purity, deep liquidity, and global recognition. In digital assets, we pioneered regulated, institutional-grade indexing as early as 2017.
Third, our collaborative agility sets us apart. We go beyond licensing, co-developing bespoke, rules-based, or dynamically rebalanced strategies with hedge funds. This collaborative approach allows for rapid prototyping, thematic alignment, and tailored solutions.
What market changes will most impact your service delivery next year?
The most impactful shift will be the regulatory clarity and institutionalisation of digital assets, driven by the rollout of MiCA in the EU, increasing clarity from the SEC and CFTC in the US, and emerging global standards for staking, token classification, and on-chain data integration.
As one of the first regulated index providers to enter the digital asset space, MarketVector delivers a series of industry-first innovations, including:
- The first institutional-quality staking rewards indexes,
- A full suite of on-chain fundamental factor indexes, in partnership with Token Terminal,
- A comprehensive digital asset classification framework, helping clients navigate sector exposures and regulatory mapping,
- A complete index family, spanning market benchmarks (e.g., COIN50, BBR) to thematic (e.g., MEME, STKR, Gold Crypto).
Furthermore, our leadership is backed by cryptocurrency experts Martin Leinweber and CEO Steven Schoenfeld, co-authors of Mastering Crypto Assets.
What represents the most significant transformation in the European ecosystem over the past year?
The most significant transformation has been the return of macro as the dominant force driving markets, reshaping how hedge fund’s view risk, construct portfolios, and source alpha. Amidst persistent inflation, geopolitical instability, interest rate divergence, and commodity shocks, price action can become decoupled from fundamental valuations for extended periods. This dislocation has ushered in a new volatility regime and broken-down traditional asset class correlations, challenging the efficacy of broad-based exposure and passive beta.
What aspect of hedge fund operations do you believe is most ripe for disruption?
The most disruptive shift facing hedge fund operations will be the convergence of 24/7 trading, real-time data infrastructure, and decentralised market structures, driven by blockchain technology, tokenisation, and AI-powered solutions.
Traditional asset markets remain constrained by legacy systems: limited trading windows, delayed settlement cycles, and centralised data bottlenecks. In contrast, the digital asset ecosystem has already evolved to operate in a 24/7, globally fragmented, high-frequency environment, where execution, custody, and analytics must function seamlessly and instantly.
Our deep expertise in digital assets has given us a front-row seat to how this new financial infrastructure operates, and how hedge funds can adapt.
Joy Yang, Head of Product Management and Marketing at MarketVector IndexesTM – Joy is responsible for managing MarketVector products and services to accelerate innovation in financial index design and adoption. She brings more than 25 years of investment experience to MarketVector, having led teams delivering index and quantitative-active investment solutions at Arabesque Asset Management, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Vanguard, Aberdeen Standard Investments, AXA Rosenberg, and Blackrock. Joy has an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering.
