Celebrating ETF winners in Canada and ETFs in Monte Carlo

This week saw the publication of the ETF Express Canadian awards’ special report featuring CIBC Mellon, National Bank Investments, National Bank of Canada and State Street. Follow this link to read our interviews with these winners and to see the full list of winners in this year’s awards.

Many congratulations to all our winners.

This week also saw me travelling to IMPower’s Fund Forum in Monte Carlo to attend a number of ETF panels. The difference in the audience’s knowledge and interest in the ETF industry between last year and this year is quite noticeable. Last year we were very much doing the ‘what is an ETF and will they crash the capital markets?’ route whereas this year the panellists were talking about the rise of active investments wrapped in an ETF, the continuing importance of thematics, the potential death of the mutual fund industry and whether they could add ETFs as a share class to a mutual fund.

Thank you to all of you who came to our panels and to the speakers who managed to be well informed but also engaging. We had good questions on ESG in ETF form and fund selection.

I also attended the crypto ETP panel, opened with a brief summary of the digital asset ETF fund flows from our data partners, Trackinsight’s Julien Scatena, and then chaired by Laurent Kssis of Issuance.Swiss AG, a new crypto ETP white labelling firm backed by Apex, and featuring speakers from 21Shares, CoinShares and Hashdex. Digital assets featured large at the conference this year, another new development, and given its ETP form, one that impacts our industry. Whispers of gossip predict the UK’s FCA is going to lower its ban on retail investment in crypto ETPs and that BlackRock is planning to launch a European digital asset product. It will be interesting to see its fee structure.

Franklin Templeton features on the site this week with Marcus Weyerer, senior ETF investment strategist, EMEA, at the firm, discussing the opportunities in emerging markets. "We see emerging markets, particularly Asia, as a growth hub currently. Growth is quite hard to come by, especially in some developed markets," Weyerer says.

Beverly Chandler, Managing Editor

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