Dan Barnes Welcome to ETF TV News, I’m Dan Barnes and joining me is Deborah Fuhr, and we’re going to talk about the new issue trends that we’ve seen over the past week. Deborah, welcome back to the show.
Deborah Fuhr Thank you for having me.
Dan Barnes So tell us, first of all, whereabouts are we in terms of the volume of issuance so far this year?
Deborah Fuhr As of November 6th, we’ve seen 920 new ETF launches around the world. That is much greater than all of last year where we saw 867 new products come to market, which is kind of surprising given that for a couple of months during the height of the pandemic, many people weren’t doing much of anything. So we’ve seen a real resurgence in launches.
Dan Barnes That’s very interesting. Are there any particular geographies or markets or market oerators that you’re seeing pop up in the most recent issues?
Deborah Fuhr There’s two out of the 12 that are on the NASDAG 100, and one of them is the largest launch for the week. So China Asset Management in China launched in NASDAG 100 ETF, which has one 136 million US dollars in it. We also saw one come to market in Korea on the NASDAG 100, which is interesting because we’ve also seen that Invesco, which launched the original QQQ ETF in the US about 20 years ago, it’s the fifth largest ETF in the US. They came out with four new products recently. One is kind of a core holding, which has an annual fee of five basis points, where the original one has 20 basis points. They also have done a growth and a NextGen, and then launched a product in a mutual fund wrapper, because as we know, in pension products like the 401k wrappers, you cannot easily buy ETFs, because they use fractional shares. So they’ve done an index product also. So I think this is interesting as a trend.
Dan Barnes Definitely, thank you. I mean, are there any thematics that you’re seeing coming out in new products, recently?
Deborah Fuhr A veterans’ ETF, Protect America, and democratic political contributions would be themes that we’ve seen come out last week.
Dan Barnes OK, and are those parts of larger trends that we’ve seen or are those relatively short term?
Deborah Fuhr We’ve definitely seen a trend towards thematic and also this year a lot towards ESG. And it appears that the election results are known in the US, we would expect that ESG will become more prevalent given Biden does support the climate change initiative, might even see that the DOL view on ESG gets changed going forward. So I think there’s a number of trends that are likely to take place this week as people know what the election results really are.
Dan Barnes That’s great. Deborah, thank you.
Deborah Fuhr Thank you.