ETF assets climbed to a new all time record in April according to the latest data from the National Stock Exchange, with a total of $1.14 trillion in more than 1,200 products at the end of last month. Total assets grew by more than 5% on the month, thanks to stellar performances from equities and commodities and another strong month of inflows. In total, more than $22 billion flowed into ETFs in April, representing more than 2% of March assets. U.S equities accounted for about half of the monthly inflows, with global equities and fixed income ETPs also jumping on surging investor interest. Commodity ETPs took in about $775 million on the month, though nearly $480 million flowed into short leveraged commodity ETPs–suggesting that investors were beginning to bet on a bubble that has popped in the first week of May. [click to continue…]
Crude Oil has been the talk of the financial media for several weeks now. When 2011 began, oil was sitting well below $10o per barrel, and it didn’t seem that it would be making any meteoric jumps in the near future, but the year had different plans in store for the important commodity. As crisis [...]
The rapid development of exchange traded products has brought with it increased diversity in the investing space. Markets segments that were once nearly impossible for the average Joe to reach have now become as easy to buy as a share of ExxonMobil. Some of these elusive market segments include emerging markets, high yield fixed income, [...]
This past week was yet another interesting one for the markets as stocks managed to rise broadly despite continued worries over the health of the Japanese economy and the ongoing situation in Libya which is quickly spiraling into an all-out war. Markets, for the most part, shrugged off these concerns and instead focused in on [...]
The opening day of the week saw equities take another tumble, as Libyan protests continue to dominate the news. Yesterday, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces fought against anti-government rebels outside of a major oil port in the country. Due to the increasingly violent and widespread protests in the major oil producing nation, traders have prepared [...]
February marked another month of growth for the U.S. ETF industry, though the pace of inflows slowed a bit from recent months. According to data from the National Stock Exchange assets stood at $1.055 trillion at the end of February, an increase of about 3.5% over the previous month. February inflows totaled $7.4 billion, down [...]
Teucrium, the firm that debuted the only pure play corn ETF last year and recently added a natural gas fund, announced the launch of its third exchange-traded product today. The Teucrium WTI Crude Oil Fund (CRUD) offers exposure to futures contracts for WTI crude oil, also known as Texas Light Sweet Crude Oil, traded on [...]
By now, many investors are well aware of the potential impact of the nuances of futures-based commodity ETPs. Contangoed markets can cause fund returns to lag behind a hypothetical return on spot prices, sometimes by a fairly wide margin. But a look at the recent history of the Oil & Gas ETFdb Category reveals another [...]
It doesn’t seem like that long ago that exchange-traded commodity products were the darlings of the ETF world. Praised for democratizing an entire asset class (and one capable of delivering non-correlated returns to investors at that), commodity ETFs saw billions of dollars of cash inflows in 2009. Investors rushed to get their hands on everything [...]
Egypt has become the center of the news world over the last week, as a series of violent protests and intensifying calls for a regime change have left the future of one of Africa’s most populous countries in doubt. Though violence has been limited to a relatively small number of incidents, protesters have continued to [...]
April of 2010 brought the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, with the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While the majority of the nation has put the spill behind in the past thanks to the capping of the leak late last year, oil continues to make headlines for all the wrong [...]
