When peeling back the layers of the ETF industry, one quickly realizes that certain corners of the market have expanded more quickly than others over the last several years. While many of the largest ETFs by total assets track equity indexes, those that have driven growth in both the number of products and total assets in recent years have focused on benchmarks linked to other asset classes, such as commodities. [click to continue…]
Toronto-based Sprott Asset Management, a newcomer to the U.S. ETF industry, became the latest issuer to introduce a physically-backed gold ETF last week, debuting the Sprott Physical Gold Trust (PHYS) on Friday. The new fund “was created to invest and hold substantially all of its assets in physical gold bullion” and will compete directly with [...]
Last year saw more than 100 new product launches, ranging from plain vanilla equity and bond funds to ETFs offering exposure to exotic new investment strategies and asset classes previously available only to a limited slice of the investing community. The innovation that has made ETFs a popular alternative to mutual funds seems ready to [...]
Commodities are the new black in the world of investing, thanks in no small part to the rise of ETFs as the tool of choice in more and more portfolios. Commodity ETFs saw cash inflows of more than $30 billion in 2009, as total assets more than doubled on the year. According to the ETF [...]
Given the tremendous amount of buzz surrounding the launch of the first U.S.-listed platinum and palladium ETFs earlier this month, perhaps the initial results for the ETFS Physical Platinum Shares (PPLT) and Physical Palladium Shares (PALL) shouldn’t be that surprising. Through their first six days of trading, average volumes for PPLT and PALL were about [...]
After a chaotic 2008, most financial markets regained some degree of normalcy in 2009, as unprecedented volatilities subsided and a gradual calming of anxieties led to the return of rational trading. But for exchange-traded commodity products 2009 was a rather tumultuous period, as expectations for increasingly stringent regulations swirled and correlations began to break down.
After weeks of anticipation, the first ETFs offering U.S. investors exposure to Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) launched on Friday, as London-based ETF Securities (ETFS) introduced the ETFS Physical Platinum Shares (PPLT) and ETFS Physical Palladium Shares (PALL). These funds bring the total number of U.S.-listed ETFs from ETFS to four, joining gold and silver ETFs [...]
In recent weeks, news that London-based ETF Securities was preparing to launch physically-backed platinum and palladium ETFs rolled through the financial markets, causing tremendous excitement among bulls and inflation bugs alike and sending prices of these metals soaring in anticipation. There are currently multiple exchange-traded products offering exposure to platinum through futures-based strategies (see this [...]
As the ETF industry has continued its rapid expansion, there has been much debate surrounding the sustainability of the current growth and the potential saturation of the market. The first ETFs were relatively simple products, offering exposure to the world’s most widely-followed equity benchmarks. But the last ten years have seen hundreds of new ETFs [...]
Platinum and palladium prices jumped to recent highs last week on news that regulators had taken an important step towards allowing London-based ETF Securities (ETFS) to list physically-backed ETFs linked to the metals to trade on U.S. exchanges. “The Securities and Exchange Commission in the past week approved proposed rule changes from the New York [...]
The reasons for the rise of the ETF industry are numerous: intraday liquidity, (potentially) superior tax efficiency, and enhanced transparency relative to traditional actively-managed mutual funds have all contributed to the billions of dollars of inflows that these funds have seen in recent years. But the real attraction for most ETF investors is the reduced [...]
