| Networking in the sun Welcome back to the office for those of us who travelled to Miami beach for the Exchange conference last week. To be honest, it’s quite nice to sit down. The event itself was quite the marathon, based in a huge hotel and exhibition centre which required at least 10 minutes of advance planning to meet or find anyone. Quite a few of my interviewees for my recap piece cited ‘walking’ as the key memory they would take away from the event.
But in fact, of course, the most important takeaway was the pleasure in actually meeting people face to face again, and in many cases meeting people for the first time who have become firm contacts and connections through the small screen over recent years.
Read all about it in my recap feature, detailing my conversations with the great and the good. It was also a great pleasure to interview Ryan McCormack of Invesco on the QQQ ETFs at the event on
the big stage, and we hope to be able to bring you that film soon.
I managed to catch up with most of the team behind fixed income specialists BondBloxx in Miami and our writer Philippa Aylmer also took time to interview Ben Morris who has newly joined the team from Bloomberg. Morris emphasises that the specialisation of fixed income ETFs should not be compared to thematic equity ETFs. "We are not trying to apply equity metrics to fixed income. We are building fixed income ETFs to resonate with fixed income markets," he says.
Two weeks’ worth of ETF launches reveals no lessening in the passion for ESG and crypto and a story that landed pretty much as I did, is 21Shares launching Australia’s first bitcoin and Ether ETFs, adding to the numbers of countries that are allowing a spot ETF in digital currencies. I spoke with 21Shares founder Hany Rashwan about the launch. "Everyone out there deserves a safe, affordable professional exposure to
crypto," he says.
Beverly Chandler, managing editor, ETF Express
Companies in this issue
21Shares
Amundi
BondBloxx
Dimensional
ETF Securities
Fidelity
First Trust
Global X
HSBC Asset Management
Invesco
iShares
Leverage Shares
Pacer ETFs
ProShares
Solactive
WisdomTree
Xtrackers
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