During a month of record exchange-traded fund outflows, there are signs that these products continue to morph into a staple in the market landscape as the first locally domiciled product is launched in Chile, opening up Santiago to a growing segment of investors.
Junk bonds might be a good anodyne for plan sponsors dealing with the pain of rising rates. But a new report released by credit rating agency Fitch warns of some new factors in the high-yield bond market that could add more of what plan sponsors don’t want—volatility.
At a time when correlations are high and assets seem to rise and fall in lockstep, factor-based investing has been garnering a lot of attention. Academics have been crunching the numbers for years -- layering their research over a traditional passive strategy creates a compelling recipe for investors that has been labeled enhanced or “smart” beta.
Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. has introduced five new equity Canada-domiciled exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on the Toronto Stock Exchange—and it has brought down the fee for two of its existing ETFs.
While exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are a big part of the pension scene in places like Europe and the U.S., ETF providers complain that the UK lags far behind largely due to consultants that don’t take them seriously.
Investors are once again turning to exchange-traded products (ETPs) to execute their investment views. In fact, global ETP flows rebounded to US$44.1 billion in July, reports BlackRock.
Over the summer, investors have been showing themselves willing to toss aside post-crisis security blankets as economic fundamentals improve in the U.S. and as the Fed sends signals that it’s prepared to pull back on its historic stimulus efforts. What all this means for markets is becoming clearer as the summer progresses. Last week’s report from BlackRock on quarterly inflows and outflows from exchange-traded products contains a few important signposts for investors trying to figure out where to go next.
Vanguard, the world’s largest mutual fund company and the third-largest global provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), has reported that its ETFs are gaining popularity around the world.
Apparently, monkeys can generate better performance than market capitalization-weighted indexes. At least that was the main finding of research done recently at London’s Cass Business School where it was found that equity indexes constructed randomly by a computer (or a pointing primate) produced higher risk-adjusted returns than an equivalent market capitalization-weighted index. And it isn’t just over the last year…or the last decade. It’s over the last 40 years—from 1968 to 2011.
Exchange-traded funds have been especially compelling for their ability to get investors in and out of less liquid areas of the world, such as emerging markets. The thing is, liquidity can come at a price when markets go nuts, which is exactly what happened in the wake of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s now-infamous May 22 remarks about pulling back stimulus in the U.S. His remarks sent shock waves through global markets, with emerging markets bearing the brunt of the sell-off.