Emma Boyde

The European Securities and Markets Authority has recommended the EU move to one-day settlement in Q4 2027

Institutional iShares assets under management have been growing at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 30% in the region, according to BlackRock

More than $500bn pumped into the fund format despite volatile markets

Stakeholder group calls for temporary suspension of penalties for failed trades when EU moves to one-day trade settlement

Research Affiliates found that S&P 500 falls before a close election and surges after

For investors hoping to make good returns by investing in funds focused on companies that emphasise gender equality it has been a difficult time. As the FT’s Alphaville recently reported, companies that score highly on the Morgan Stanley Holistic Equal and Representation Score (HERS) screen last year delivered their worst relative performance since 2011. The performance data must be confusing for those who less than 18 months ago were reading Morgan Stanley research which claimed that based on…

With more than 10 per cent of people globally now suffering from obesity it is no surprise the share price of the providers of the latest weight-loss drugs has surged. But investors seeking exposure through two newly launched weight-loss exchange traded funds need to ask if they are the best way to gain exposure to this generation of drugs, industry observers say. The Roundhill GLP-1 Weight Loss ETF (OZEM) and the Amplify Weight Loss Drug and Treatment ETF (THNR) both launched on May 21 with t…

Aakash Choubey says it was during India’s Covid lockdowns that he realised something was seriously wrong at Khaitan & Co. There was a sudden jump in resignations and requests for sabbaticals, the firm’s HR partner explains — which made him realise that not only were some staff struggling with their mental health but also that some of their difficulties might be work-related. “During Covid, we realised that personal boundaries were being erased. We were in lockdown for close to a year in India.…

The exchange traded fund industry faces a perfect storm on May 28 when the US cuts trade settlement times — with the transition occurring over a public holiday weekend and amid a series of major index rebalancings. Gerard Walsh, who heads Northern Trust’s global banking and markets client solutions group, said he was having urgent last-minute talks with asset management clients, some of whom still seemed oblivious to the looming task at hand. “Our key thing at Northern Trust is we’re talking t…

A political “war on woke capitalism” has soured sentiment towards investing according to environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles — delivering a blow to the whole concept of doing well by doing good. But behavioural scientists reckon that those asset managers predicting that “ESG will be dead in five years” are ignoring fundamental truths about how investors act. They have found that, while political storms might blow through investment communities, people’s underlying values chan…

China ‘national team’ activity and interest in India emerge as clear trends in otherwise ‘messy’ picture from analysts

Fund providers in Europe that until recently saw little threat to their business model of selling actively managed mutual funds appear to be changing their tune. Two surveys released over the past few days reveal the marked change in sentiment. The first, performed by Blackwater, an exchange traded fund consultancy, found that 62 per cent of European fund managers are now concerned by the growth of ETFs, up from 18 per cent in 2021, when it last conducted the survey. Even more striking were th…

Passive investors whose ethos is to try to take very long-term views on their portfolio construction face some hard choices. This year, a record number of people globally will go to the polls, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East show no signs of abating and on a purely technical basis investors have to ask themselves whether the US market, which tends to have a heavy weighting in many portfolios, can continue to trade at record highs. Andrew Prosser, head of investments at InvestEngine, a…

Inflows to US exchange traded funds hit $583bn in 2023, but 60 per cent of that money went into ETFs that cost investors no more than 0.1 per cent per year further squeezing margins for hard-pressed issuers, according to analysis by FactSet. Asset-weighted expense ratios for equity and bond ETFs were shaved by between 0.003 per cent and 0.002 per cent compared to the previous year, indicating how little room issuers feel they have left for manoeuvre. Plain vanilla equity funds were the hardest…

The past 12 months have been punishing for foreign exchange traded fund investors with exposure to China, but fresh signs of “national team” involvement might give risk-averse market participants pause for thought. Z-Ben Advisors, a specialist research consultancy based in Shanghai, noted in a report released last month that institutional investors were continuing to increase their equity holdings via ETFs and that this activity was extending beyond the historical core China national team playe…

Investors in funds that follow a narrow theme have lost out on more than two-thirds of their potential total returns over the past five years due to buying high and selling low, research from Morningstar reveals. Thematic funds that existed for the entire five-year period ending June 30 enjoyed annualised returns of 7.3 per cent, but the typical investor received only 2.4 per cent a year as many bought in after the bulk of returns had been made. The return gaps were far wider in exchange trade…

Armed with messianic conviction and social media savvy, Cathie Wood has built a lucrative career pitching disruptive companies to US retail investors. But even the 67-year-old acknowledges that her quest to bring Ark Investment Management, the firm she set up in 2014 and that is headquartered in the Florida beachside town of St Petersburg, to Europe is a daunting one. Europe is a “tough nut to crack,” Wood told the Financial Times. “We knew, as an American company, that Europe and the UK is th…

A decision by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to shorten the period for settling bond and share trades — from two days to just one — has prompted a burst of activity in the exchange traded fund industry. Much of it has been trying to assess the difficulties this will pose in Europe — as US securities now represent more than 40 per cent of EU funds’ assets under management, according to the European Fund and Asset Management Association. Biweekly trials of the new one-day settlement r…

Demand for data-screening services that can help customers find investments that meet environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards has soared in recent years. More than 20 per cent of global fund assets under management were invested using at least one restriction screen (which enables investors to avoid certain sectors or companies) by the end of June 2023 — 10 times more than three years earlier, according to a report by Morgan Stanley. As the Morgan Stanley researchers point out, de…

Investment grade corporate bond exchange traded funds suffered their second-highest monthly outflows on record in September, even as investors poured money into the large companies that issued the debt. Analysis from BlackRock shows net outflows of $4.1bn from investment grade credit ETFs — selling that was concentrated in US-listed vehicles although their Europe-listed counterparts also suffered outflows of $0.6bn. That number has only been exceeded once since BlackRock’s records began, in Ma…