London Stock Exchange welcomed GraniteShares and Goldman Sachs Asset Management as new ETP issuers in September 2019, following on from adding ThinkCapital ETFs as a new issuer in January 2019. There are 34 ETP issuers on London Stock Exchange.
Franklin Templeton listed attractive country ETFs covering South Korea, China and Brazil (starting at 0.09%). iShares and HSBC joined Invesco providing access to Saudi Arabia. Goldman Sachs and iShares also enable ETF investment in Chinese government bonds since this year. Tabula has expanded its list of credit-ETFs.
However, a number of ETFs disappeared as well. Across Europe, 80 ETFs have been liquidated and 51 merged with other ETFs. In the event of liquidation, the ETF pays back the remaining fund volume to the investors, while in the event of a merger, the units are merged and retained in a new or existing ETF.
Strong growth in ETF fund volume
Both equity ETFs and bond ETFs have attracted over £60 billion of investor money in 2019 to date. At the end of October 2019, a total of around £670 billion were invested in European ETFs.Even though ETFs are increasingly establishing themselves as a product for private investors, most of the assets invested come from institutional investors. Despite the current interest rate situation, bond ETFs were the most popular, with inflows of over £36 billion (as of 31/10/2019). Sustainable ETFs also enjoyed great popularity with inflows of almost £10 billion pounds. Around £6 billion were invested in smart beta strategies. The rest of the volume growth is largely attributable to equity ETFs. Commodity ETFs did not shrink but hardly grew in relation to the other asset classes.
Less trading, high liquidity
As the volatility in 2019 was much lower than in the previous year, the monthly ETF trading volume did not reach the levels of December 2018 either. However, this had no impact on the liquidity of the ETFs.Low ETF costs
The ongoing competitive pressure between ETF providers continues to cause falling cost ratios for the standard indices. While established providers such as iShares, Xtrackers and Lyxor have been operating a core portfolio with particularly cost-effective ETFs for some time, Amundi and JP Morgan followed suit this year with very cost-effective products starting at 0.04% running costs. The cost-cutting round also did not stop at the bond ETFs. Physically replicating ETFs on the global bond index Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregates are already available from 0.10%, even though up to 17,000 different bonds are represented in the index.On the other hand, numerous niche products have been launched at considerably higher costs. HANetf with a Kuwait product (0.80%) and a healthcare innovation ETF (0.75%) are top of the list.
ComStage becomes Lyxor and more news from the ETF providers
The range of providers of ETFs is also very much in motion. The major acquisition of ComStage by Lyxor will not be implemented until June 2020 and will lead to numerous fund closures and mergers.The Bank of Montreal BMO has even announced its intention to withdraw completely from the European market. By contrast, the major US investment bank Goldman Sachs entered the European Market with several ETFs at the end of 2019.
Investment legend John C. Bogle died
Friends of passive management suffered a huge loss at the beginning of the year: John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and initiator of the first index fund for private investors, died in January at the age of 89. He left behind Vanguard, a global index fund and ETF manager - now the world's largest mutual fund provider and manager of over $5 trillion.User record on justETF.com
There is also positive news about our own activities. We were again able to grow stronger and increase the number of registered users on our platform to 162,000! We are proud to be able to attract such a large group of ETF enthusiasts to our offer. The number of monthly users of our website is now 460,000 with 5.3 million page views per month. justETF is by far the largest and most frequented platform for investing with ETFs in Europe.Thank you very much to our users and business partners for the great year 2019!
