Investment Exposure to International Markets leads April Launches

This report aggregates newly launched funds in April and highlights the performance of the funds launched in March.

• 27 funds were launched in April, continuing the slowing trend of ETP launches from March
• 16 funds were launched in the Americas, 11 in Europe, and there were no funds launched in the APAC region.
• Only two of the funds had geographic exposure to the United States.

April New Listings

While issuers continue to explore unique ETP concepts to draw in investors, such as the Purpose Best Ideas Fund, the strongest theme throughout the launches in April was Large Cap, Broad focused, ETPs. Many of the funds launched, were focused on indices tracking the top equities trading on specific exchanges or within their sector, providing safe liquidity to a wide range of possible investors.

Eight leveraged funds were launched to help boost the mild volatility in gold and the top equities trading in Europe.

The majority of the funds launched focused on areas outside of the United States, including a strong focus on Japanese hedged ETPs, added by WisdomTree. iShares in Canada launched two ETPs that invest in large, mid and small cap equities in Europe, while also hedging to the Canadian Dollar. This follows the continuing trend seen throughout the year of providing investors with exposure to international markets while reducing risk through actions such as currency hedging.

March Flows

Of the ETPs listed in March, inflows were focused on the broad market and financial segment, with the majority going into American listed funds.

The leading fund was the First Trust Dorsey Wright Focus 5 ETF, which is designed to provide targeted exposure to the five First Trust sector and industry based ETFs.

Inflows were weakest into the European listed funds, which accounted for just 18% of all inflows across the three regions. The Americas took 48.5% and APAC gained 33.5% of all inflows, which is interesting to see considering there were no new funds launched in the APAC region for the month of April.