Fund Launches and Updates

GSAM has cut the fee on its Goldman Sachs Access China Government Bond UCITS ETF by a third. The new TER is 0.24%. Link

HANetf is set to close the KMEFIC FTSE Kuwait Equity UCITS ETF (KUW8) after the strategy failed to gather significant assets. Initially launched in April 2019, KUW8’s last day of trading on European stock exchanges will be 25 January with the ETF officially terminating on 8 February. Link

HSBC Global Asset Management has halved the fee on the HSBC MSCI China UCITS ETF (HMCH) from 0.60% to 0.30%. Launched in January 2011, it currently has $683m assets under management. Link

Invesco expanded its MSCI universal ESG ETF range with the launch of two strategies focused on Japanese and Pacific ex-Japan equities. Link

KraneShares has expanded its European ETF range with the launch of a China healthcare range. The KraneShares MSCI All China Health Care Index UCITS ETF (KURE) is listed on the London Stock Exchange with a TER of 0.65%. Link

Tabula Investment Management has entered the ESG arena with the launch of Europe’s first investment grade bond climate change ETF. The Tabula EUR IG Bond Paris-aligned Climate UCITS ETF (TABC) is listed on Deutsche Boerse with an OCF of 0.25%. Link

Vanguard is closing all of its London-listed factor ETFs due to “insufficient demand”. The four ETFs had a combined $360m (£264m) in assets under management as of 14 January, and will stop trading on 23 February at 2pm. Link

In the U.S., Capital Group has hired a BlackRock veteran to jump start the launch of its ETF group.

BlackRock’s Holly Framsted will join Capital Group in March to lead the firm’s foray into the actively managed ETF market. The firm plans to launch both equity and fixed income ETF strategies in early 2022. Link

Ark Investment Management is planning to launch the ARK Space Exploration ETF (ticker ARKX), according to a SEC filing. The once-niche firm now oversees about $41.5 billion in ETF products, compared with less than $3.5 billion in the same period in 2020. Link

Flows

Morningstar reported that European ETFs closed 2020 breaking through the EUR1 trillion barrier in assets. Inflows in the fourth quarter amounted to EUR44.4 billion, pushing the total for the year to EUR102.7 billion.

Environmental, social, and governance ETFs were the big winners in the fourth quarter, netting EUR20.8 billion of inflows. Flows into equity ETFs accelerated strongly in the fourth quarter to EUR38.3 billion and totalled EUR53.3 billion in 2020. Link

Global ETF assets are now at an all-time high of $8tn. Investors worldwide allocated $762.9bn into ETFs last year, up 34 per cent on the net inflows of $569bn registered in 2019. Link

Noteworthy

BTCetc Bitcoin Exchange Traded Crypto (BTCE) has recorded average daily trading amounting to €57m in the first 11 days of January, according to data from Deutsche Börse.

A similar trend has taken hold on Wall Street — Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust has posted average daily turnover of almost $1bn in the first two weeks of this year. Link

More than one in 20 exchange traded funds were axed last year as surging inflows failed to lift all boats, but issuers’ enthusiasm for new launches remained undimmed. Worldwide, a record 297 ETFs were shuttered during 2020 but new launches comfortably outpaced closures, with the number of ETFs rising by 318 to 6,518 last year. Link

Nancy Davis of Quadratic Capital Management LLC offered a glimpse of the future when she pivoted from her hedge fund to launch an ETF in 2019. Launched in May 2019, the Quadratic Interest Rate Volatility and Inflation Hedge ETF (IVOL) has become a breakout hit as assets have jumped to more than $1 billion. Link

Vanguard’s assets under management have surged beyond the $7tn mark for the first time after the investment industry’s fiercest price competitor attracted net cash inflows of $186bn last year.

Investors poured a record $210bn last year into Vanguard’s exchange traded fund arm, which secured more than a quarter of the ETF industry’s entire global cash inflows in 2020.Link

JPMorgan Asset Management, its Shanghai-based joint venture, China International Fund Management, and investment platform Snowball Finance, have published a survey of the current ETF landscape in China.

The survey found that the rising awareness of fund allocation is driving the development of ETFs, making ETFs more popular among individual investors. Link

London Stock Exchange Group confirms that the European Commission has conditionally approved its proposed all share acquisition of Refinitiv. Link

The best-performing actively managed equity fund in 2020 was the Ark Genomic Revolution ETF, which returned 180 per cent. Several other actively managed ETFs from Ark also appear in the top 20, including products investing in renewable energy and technology. Link

Fund in Focus

With a lot of press focused on innovation themed ETFs and the obvious subject of healthcare, this week’s fund in focus is the L&G Healthcare Breakthrough UCITS ETF which tracks the performance of companies that are actively engaged in the healthcare technology value-chain. Launched in July 2019, the ETF has reached $115.8M in AUM, TER 0.49%.

Year-to-date the returns are up 7.03% and last year enjoyed a return of 66.94%.