In case you overlooked it, Deutsche Bank’s ‘X-trackers’ brand of ETFs is getting serious traction.
Olly Ludwig recently wrote about First Trust enjoying a banner year. 2014 has certainly been great year for First Trust, but I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out Deutsche X-trackers’ breakout year.
Deutsche X-trackers’ total assets pale in comparison to First Trust’s—at least for now—but assets under management growth of 158 percent in 2014 through Oct. 31 has been nothing short of spectacular.
Take a look at Deutsche X-trackers’ annual rise in AUM since 2011:
Source: ETF.com
To be clear, Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management (DeAWM) has a longer history in the U.S. ETF market outside of equities through their commodity pool products branded under PowerShares.
The $4.9 billion PowerShares DB Commodity Tracking ETF (DBC | B-86), launched in February 2006, is actually run by DeAWM, though that’s about to change. Come the first quarter of next year, PowerShares will fully take over DBC and 10 other funds in this suite of commodity ETFs, the two companies said last week in a press release.
DeAWM also has a massive ETF presence in Europe (branded as db X-trackers), where they are one of the largest ETF providers on the continent. Yet, as a stand-alone entity branded under Deutsche X-trackers in the U.S., they’ve struggled to gather assets until recently.
They’ve had the most comprehensive suite of currency-hedged ETFs, but investors largely shunned them in previous years in the weak dollar environment.
Then, Abenomics in Japan began to draw interest in hedged ETFs in 2013. This year, eurozone woes and the paring of quantitative easing in the U.S. has drawn even more attention to these products.
