FlexShares’ Huemmer comments on dividends in the new financial world

TrueMark Investments’ Principal and Chief Investment Officer Jordan Waldrep, Principal, provider of the ESG Active Opportunities ETF (ECOZ), comments that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated new societal trends such as working from home and contactless payments.

Legg Mason and its affiliate, ClearBridge Investments, LLC, have launched Legg Mason’s first ETF using the semi-transparent technology of Precidian Investments LLC, ActiveShares.

Leveraged and short ETPs have seen growth over the period of market volatility. REX Shares’ US Big Oil Index 3x Leveraged ETN (NRGU) has had its principal amount increased by USD250 million, to a new total of USD975 million and 19.5 million notes, respectively, its eighth upsize in 2020, so far.

Latest research from Cerulli Associates finds that the Covid-19 pandemic has eased, if not totally dispelled, long-standing worries that Europe’s ETF sector would buckle in the event of mass redemptions.

PwC Luxembourg’s 20th edition of its Annual Global Fund Distribution (GFD) Poster reveals that the number of cross-border ETFs has increased from 4,435 in 2018 to 4,780 in 2019, showing a growth rate of 7.8 per cent.

QS Investors is one of nine subsidiary firms of Legg Mason, and is where the quantitative solutions for institutional investors are found. The majority of its USD15 billion in assets is in quant solutions which marry the firm’s research to client needs, says Nick Hooten, Head of Investment Solutions, at the firm. Hooten will be joining the ETFs in Depth panel at etfLIVE US in October this year.

EFAMA has called on the European Commission (EC) to enforce the creation of a consolidated tape (CT), commenting: “MiFID II still fails to deliver a CT and the notion of “Reasonable Commercial Basis” in data cost has been largely overlooked.

Water Island Capital has a 20-year history of managing money in event-driven strategies and has chosen this most event-driven of times in which to launch its first ETF, the AltShares Merger Arbitrage ETF.

Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) senior vice president of ETF investor services, Ryan Sullivan, has reached for his crystal ball and made some predictions for the ETF industry for the rest of the year – a brave initiative given the background of what he calls: “The unprecedented environment that we have found ourselves in.”