BSE, formerly known as the Bombay Stock Exchange, and S&P Dow Jones Indices, a leading index provider, have announced the launch of the S&P BSE 500 Shariah Index. The new index measures the performance of all Shariah-compliant stocks within the broad-based S&P BSE 500 Index. The index is the first to be launched out of a strategic partnership formed between the two companies in February of this year.

ETF Securities believes that the commodity super-cycle is far from over, despite recent falls in commodity prices which have wiped billions off the firm’s assets under management. The London-headquartered exchange-traded product (ETP) provider asserts that the main fundamental drivers of the super-cycle are still in force and that recent commodity price weaknesses are more related to business-cycle fluctuations and short-term commodity-specific supply increases than a change in structural fundamentals.

FinEx has launched Russia’s first ever locally listed exchange-traded fund (ETF), the FinEx Tradable Russian Corporate Bonds UCITS ETF (FXRB). The fund has been listed on the Moscow Exchange and provides exposure to shorter maturity liquid Eurobonds issued by Russian non-sovereign issuers. The Moscow listing, which comes just two months after the fund debuted on the Irish and London stock exchanges, will appeal to Russian-based investors seeking convenient access to a liquid diversified domestic corporate bond portfolio.

The launch of EDHEC-Risk Institute’s Scientific Beta platform, which aims to revolutionise the index world, is yet another mark of the immense innovation and intense competition that is fizzing through the indexing industry. Professor Noël Amenc, Director of EDHEC-Risk Institute and CEO of ERI Scientific Beta, said: “There is dual motivation behind the Scientific Beta initiative: to encourage a more transparent index market and to allow investors to better manage the risks of their investment in smart beta benchmarks.”

Smart beta is a term that seems to have suddenly emerged out of nowhere to describe the rise of a new form of ‘passive’ investing. The very words themselves conjure up a certain egg-headed technical prowess, implying that all the other beta trackers out there are just “back of the class” dullards, market capitalisation based, one-trick ponies that don’t do all the clever stuff that smart beta trackers can accomplish with their quantitative prowess. Scratch beneath the surface though and we discover a slightly more honest admission by the ETF industry.

As the search for yield goes international, S&P Dow Jones Indices has announced that its S&P Pan Asia Dividend Aristocrats Index has been licensed to SSgA’s SPDR ETFs division for the launch of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) based on the index. Part of the popular ‘Dividend Aristocrats’ suite, the index measures the performance of the highest yielding Pan Asian companies that have followed a managed-dividends policy of increasing dividends for at least seven consecutive years. It includes constituents from both developed and emerging markets.

SPDR ETFs, the exchange traded funds (ETF) platform of State Street Global Advisors (SSgA), has unveiled the world’s first ETF to deliver pure exposure to emerging market inflation-linked debt. Debuting on the Deutsche Börse – additional cross-listings are likely over time – the SPDR Barclays EM Inflation-Linked Local Bond UCITS ETF (SYBI) will appeal to investors looking to diversify emerging market exposure while protecting against inflation. The fund includes inflation-linked sovereign bonds issued by Brazil, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Poland, Turkey, Israel, South Korea and Thailand.

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) linked to frontier markets, such as the db X-trackers S&P Select Frontier UCITS ETF, present an enticing proposition for investors. Inherently a long-term investment opportunity, they not only offer potential for strong returns, but also provide an ideal means of portfolio diversification. With 22% of the world’s population, of which almost 60% is under 30 years of age, abundant natural resources and low labour costs, frontier markets are “too significant to ignore”, says Tim Drinkall of Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

Mark Wiedman, the Global Head of iShares, the exchange traded funds (ETF) platform of BlackRock, has predicted that the European exchange-traded product (ETP) sector – which includes exchange-traded commodities (ETCs) as well as conventional ETFs – will exceed $900 billion in size by the end of 2017, as the use of ETPs spreads further across the continent and into new investor segments.

As exchange-traded funds (ETFs) continue their march towards the investment mainstream, iShares has accelerating the process in the Netherlands with the launch of 50 of its ETF products on Euroclear’s FundSettle fund processing platform. iShares’ products are the first ETFs on the platform, which hosts over 65,000 mutual funds, linking fund managers via straight-through processing with third-party distributors such as private banks and wealth managers.