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Week in Review - January 16, 2023

Ignites

Ignites is the preeminent source for news about the mutual fund industry

发布日期: 2024年1月16日

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Bitcoin ETFs Are (Almost) Everywhere

Welcome to this week's News Brief.

The first 11 U.S.-listed Bitcoin ETFs began trading last week, and on the day they hit the market, more than $4.6 billion changed hands, according to Bloomberg Intelligence data. Half of that trading volume was at Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust, which was morphed into an ETF last week. However, some of that money was in redemptions. The fund reported $95 million in net outflows on its first day of trading, and another $484 million on its second. iShares' Bitcoin Trust, meanwhile, garnered the most sales: $498 million during its first two days of trading.

The newly launched ETFs were quickly available for purchase on platforms from Charles Schwab, Fidelity and SoFi. Vanguard, however, has banned Bitcoin ETFs from its platform because they "do not align with [the firm's] offer focused on asset classes, such as equities, bonds and cash, which Vanguard views as the building blocks of a well-balanced, long-term investment portfolio," a company spokesperson told Ignites.

Sponsors of the strategies – which all track the spot price of Bitcoin – immediately started churning out marketing materials, hoping to help themselves stand out from their rivals. VanEck and Franklin Templeton, for example, made social media posts that played off various viral memes. Bitwise, meanwhile, had several weeks earlier released an ad featuring Jonathan Goldsmith, known as "The Most Interesting Man in the World," who since 2007 has featured in Dos Equis beer commercials.

Chart of the Week

Salim Ramji, who has led BlackRock's iShares business since 2019, is leaving the firm to "pursue a new career path," according to a company memo. The firm is eliminating his position and has created a new strategic global product and solutions business that will include the iShares product line. That group will be led by Stephen Cohen, the firm's current product chief."We always viewed ETFs as a technology, a technology that facilitated investing. And just as our Aladdin technology has become core to asset management, so too have ETFs," said Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, in a statement. "That’s why we believe embedding our ETF and index business across the entire firm will accelerate the growth of iShares and every investment strategy at BlackRock."