29/03/2012
ETF catalogue from SPDR soon to grow
The creator of the first S&P 500 ETF (nearly USD100bn in assets), Jim Ross, senior managing director at State Street Global Advisors (SSgA), and global head of SPDR ETF, announced on Wednesday in Paris that in 30 to 60 days, the asset management firm should have finalised the release of three new ETF funds in the areas of strategic asset allocation and absolute returns.There will be a fund of funds with an income strategy (dividends and bond alpha strategies), a global asset allocation ETF, and a «real assets» product launched in partnership with Blackstone. Although the current SPDR range includes only physical replication funds, which reproduce their underlyings either in their entirety or via sampling, Gross has not ruled out the possibility that SSgA may at some point release synthetic replication ETFS, for markets which are difficult to access, or on which liquidity is insufficient, as for example in frontier markets.However, “although one should never say never,” the head of SPDR remains highly circumspect about actively-managed ETFs and leveraged and/or inverse ETFs.At the presentation, held as part of a road show to promote the release in Europe of a UCITS-compliant version of the SPDR S&P 500, Marco Fusco, chairman and CEO of SSgA in France, says that 23 SPDR products were released in Europe last year, bringing the total number of available products in the product range to 36. Since the beginning of 2012, the family of products has attracted 10% of all inflows in Europe (and as much as 19% in February), with inflows equivalent to all of 2011 put together.
