Today's new listings
USA
First Trust will be listing a first-of-its-kind ETF that hoovers up American institutional preferred securities (FPEI). Preferred securities are unique to American tax law and are something of a hybrid between equity and debt. Like debts they pay a fixed interest rates to schedule; like equity they're lower down the capital structure and pay out quarterly or annually.
First Trust already has an ETF that tracks preferred securities (FPE). What is different about FPEI - and what makes it a world first - is that it gobbles up institutional preferred securities. Institutional preferred securities are only available over the counter and in $100,000 chunks. (Retail preferred securities trade on exchange and in smaller pieces.)
FPEI will be actively managed to offset risk and offer investors exposure to an asset class that is typically only available to institutional investors. No listing date has been given.
Corporate action:
State Street's S&P Oil and Gas Equipment & Services ETF (XES) has received payment from a law suit against Weatherford International. As a result, the NAV of each share will be affected by $0.0093.
Today's news from around the web
Race to the bottom fees effecting indexes too
Inflows into ETFs more or less correlate with fees. The funds with the cheapest fees see the most inflows; the funds with higher fees see less. This is having an effect on funds, which have cut fees, but also index providers, which are seeing their slice of the pie disappear. Major issuers like Charles Schwab and BlackRock are now using their own indexes to avoid paying index fees.
China seeing outflows despite great performance
2017 was meant to be the year of China. A-shares were added to MSCI's house of indexes, political turmoil hit the US and Europe and topping it all off, Chinese companies (and indexes tracking Chinese stocks) are performing very well. So why is China seeing outflows?
