ETF Times: 15-19 March
Lyxor announces aggressive expansion plans, new listings in Germany, and the week's ETF winners and losers
The second ranked European ETF provider by market share announced its intentions to launch 50-60 new ETFs in 2010. The new funds will include fixed income launches in the UK, with a particular focus on US government bond funds, according to Claus Hein, head of Lyxor’s ETF business for the UK and Nordic regions. These new funds will be in addition to the real estate-related ETFs that Lyxor has already introduced this year on the NYSE Euronext platform.
New Listings
Less than a month after rolling out 17 ETFs on the Deutsche Borse, Amundi has listed a further 21 ETFs on the exchange. Ten of the new ETFs track various MSCI Europe equity sector indices including banks, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, healthcare, industrials, insurance, IT, materials, telecom services and utilities. Two more specialise in the stocks of companies which offer some of the highest dividend yields in Europe and the Eurozone. The remaining nine are Eurozone bond funds including ones linked to government bond indices with varying maturities, a money market fund, an inflation protected government bond fund and a corporate bond fund. These launches, and plans for further new listings in the coming weeks, are part of Amundi's efforts to gain share in the German ETF market. While it's normally difficult to upstage existing offerings, we think the firm has a possibility for success as many of its new ETFs are charging lower fees than the competition.
ETF Securities launched a new multi-commodity ETF on the London Stock Exchange. The ETF will track the DJ-UBS 3-month Forward Commodity Index, which is comprised of futures on 19 different commodities. The weighting of the commodities will be two-thirds based on liquidity and one-third on production. According to the firm, the index methodology reduces the impact of roll yield, which has been hurting the returns on futures-based commodity funds over the past year, as it uses longer-date futures. The fund charges a total expense ratio of 0.55% annually.
Best and Worst Performers for the week of 15-19 March
The best performing ETFs for the week included those tracking agricultural commodities like soybeans, hogs and corn. These funds were jolted by the potential for increased demand from China as a drought negatively impacted the domestic supply outlook, and it reopened its ports to pork shipments from the US. A handful of developing markets enjoyed a solid week as rising precious metals prices helped the miner-heavy South African equity markets and Standard and Poor's upgraded its outlook on India to stable from negative, boosting Indian markets. Meanwhile, good news for bankrupt US real-estate operator General Growth Properties came in the form of an increased bid, which helped to lift the US real-estate sector.
Sugar and natural gas continued their run among the worst-performers for the third straight week as the weather continued to be warmer than normal for this time of year. Favourable weather continues to increase the supply outlook for sugar and reduce demand for natural gas, pressuring the prices of both. Greek equity markets suffered as strikes continued in the face of government efforts to tackle its budget deficit and prospects of an EU-led bailout of the country became increasingly uncertain.
