ETF industry thrives in difficult markets and interesting year

Against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic and, in the US, an upcoming Presidential election, a huge amount of uncertainty surrounds our lives at the moment. However, the ETF industry continues to flower in what Foreside’s Jennifer Hoope calls ‘an interesting year’ in our interview with her this week. 

We also have the launch of a new ETF provider this week, with ETF industry veteran Gabriel Hammond back, after his extended gardening leave from selling Alerian, with a new ETF business, Emles Advisors, working with Alerian CFO, Dave Saxena, to create a range of ETFs that meet their needs as investors.

Figures from Refinitiv’s Lipper team show that Europe enjoyed net inflows into ETFs in September, but market upheavals saw assets in total reduced. Invesco published its fifth Invesco Global Factor Investing Study revealing that, for wholesale investors, ETFs now account for 50 per cent of factor allocations, standing at 35 per cent for private banks and rising to 74 per cent for wealth managers.

REX Shares, an ETF Express US ETF awards winner for two years, recently announced that it had gone over the USD1 billion mark in assets, largely on the back of its leveraged and inverse range of ETPs, particularly the FAANG+ product which appears to have hit the sweet spot with many investors. We interview REX Shares CEO, Greg King, another ETF industry veteran who can lay claim to having invented the ETN, having worked at Barclays in London and New York where he designed the first ETN to track commodities under the iPath brand, a collaboration between Barclays and iShares.

This editorial is being written half way through the etfLIVE North America digital summit. We have seen such impressive panels with speakers drawn from the entire ETF ecosystem from across the US, from New York to Omaha to San Francisco. The Big Debate - will semi-transparent ETFs cause the end of the mutual fund - was won by the Blue Tractor team with a resounding, almost double majority, saying yes, despite a stout defence of the structure from American Century’s Ed Rosenberg. The most interesting question came up during the panel: if ETFs had been the original structure back in 1940, would mutual funds, arriving now have had such support?

I leave you with that to think about for the week. The films of each panel from the event will be up on our site as soon as possible.





Beverly Chandler
Managing Editor, ETF Express

Companies in this issue
BlackRock
Emles Advisors
Foreside
Invesco
NextFins
ProShares
Refinitiv
REX Shares
State Street

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