Planet Tracker calls on ETF providers to avoid deforestation risk

New ETF index provider, Blue Horizon Capital, working with Exchange Traded Concepts, is launching the Blue Horizon BNE ETF, focusing on the new energy economy. 

Since launching active ETFs in the summer, Agility Shares has raised close to USD51 million. The ETFs are managed by USD2.1 billion Toews Asset Management and Dan Kullman (pictured), Director of Education and Training at the firm explains that the majority of the asset raise has been in THY, the firm’s Agility Shares Dynamic Tactical Income ETF, while the smaller asset base has gone into MRSK, the Agility Shares Managed Risk ETF, designed to attempt to lower drawdowns and lessen risk without capping any potential gains.

2020 has been the year in which the UK’s Church of England went into the index business, with the January launch on the London Stock Exchange of the FTSE-TPI Climate Transition Index.

There has been quite the conversion outbreak in the ETF world in the latter half of this year, with a number of US-based asset managers converting their existing funds into ETFs.

Thematic ETFs have proved to be one of the great success stories from a challenging year, and have proved to be pure gold for Amplify ETFs, which has taken to that gold theme quite literally with the launch of the Amplify Pure Junior Gold Miners ETF (NYSE Arca: JGLD), an index-based ETF comprised of companies engaged in junior and exploratory gold mining. 

The US ETF industry has reached assets of USD5 trillion over 2020, despite all the strains and volatility that the year has experienced, according to Cerulli Associates.

Brown Brothers Harriman has launched its first C-Suite Asset Manager Survey, which found that Covid-19, the economy and fee wars are the top concerns for C-suite executives. 

In this most interesting of years, fixed income ETFs have enjoyed the best of times and the worst of times. Gene Tannuzzo, Deputy Global Head of Fixed Income at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, which has USD498 billion in assets, comments that year to date, fixed income returns look ‘very average, but they arrived there in an unusual way’.

Former hedge fund manager, Michael Winter, has seized the opportunities created by the arrival of the ETF rule with the launch of Leatherback Asset Management and his first ETF, the Leatherback Long/Short Alternative Yield ETF (LBAY).

ETF heavyweight VanEck launched a bitcoin ETN this week on Deutsche Börse, the latest launch in series of products focused on cryptocurrencies, and significant because VanEck represents the ETF establishment stepping into this somewhat esoteric world.