Steve Johnson

Investors pumped an outsized $126.5bn into exchange traded funds in March as a series of markets from Wall Street to gold hit record highs, according to data from BlackRock. The buying spree was the third-strongest monthly figure since 2021 — beaten only by a surge in inflows in the final two months of 2023. And even beyond the punchy headline reading there were further signs of bullishness with flows to equity ETFs at $96.6bn accounting for the vast majority of the tally. Sector ETFs investi…

More US-listed China-focused exchange traded funds have closed down since the start of this year than in any previous full year as investors continue to fight shy of the world’s second-largest economy. Liquidations of ETFs investing on the basis of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors are also on track to smash through prior records — both in the US and globally — amid a backlash against the concept. The culls have been enacted despite ever rising enthusiasm for ETFs globally, wi…

Fee compression may finally be reaching the lucrative indexing industry with global revenues rising less rapidly than fund industry assets last year. Worldwide revenues for the increasingly influential index providers rose 9.3 per cent to a record $5.8bn last year, according to estimates from Burton Taylor International Consulting, a research and advisory group focused on capital markets. However, this was comfortably below last year’s 15.5 per cent rise in the assets of open-ended and exchang…

The UK’s first cryptocurrency exchange traded products are finally set to begin trading next week, almost a decade after the first such vehicles appeared in Sweden. WisdomTree and 21Shares have been given the green light by the Financial Conduct Authority, the City regulator, to list ETPs investing in “physical” spot bitcoin and ether, the two most popular digital tokens, on the London Stock Exchange on May 28. However, the ETPs — which form part of a barrage of similar vehicles expected to li…

The all-powerful US equity market grabbed the lion’s share of a solid $116.1bn of global net inflows to exchange traded funds in May, as the industry bounced back from April’s “muted” $69.6bn of buying. However, amid signs that the tectonic plates of monetary policy and market dynamics were slowly shifting, there were noteworthy inflows to some comparatively niche areas such as European equities, utility stocks and high-yield bonds. High-yield bond ETFs pulled in a net $5.4bn of new money in M…

The rapidly growing exchange traded funds industry could seize half of the money currently held by long-term US mutual funds in the coming decade, according to estimates by Citi. US investors have gradually been switching from mutual funds to ETFs for at least the past decade, attracted by lower costs, better liquidity and greater tax efficiency. Mutual funds, excluding money market funds, have seen net outflows in nine of the past 10 years in the US, according to data from the Investment Compa…

‘Persistent liquidity challenges’ and denuding of the index have ended a 12-year experiment

Bonanza helped lift global September inflows to $141bn, keeping industry on track for record-breaking year

The Dutch asset manager joins growing number of active managers to enter exchange traded fund industry

The $360bn manager has built an active ETF name in the US with CLO funds, but this taps into its Japan equities expertise