ETF Watch: First Trust Adds RiverFront EM Active Fund

The firm expands its growing lineup of RiverFront-managed ETFs.

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First Trust has added a new ETF to its lineup of actively managed ETFs from RiverFront Investment Group. The First Trust RiverFront Dynamic Emerging Markets ETF (RFEM) is listed on the Nasdaq and comes with an expense ratio of 0.95%.

RFEM primarily invests in emerging market equities. The fund comes with a dynamic currency hedge that can be adjusted as needed, and selects companies based on their exposure to the value, quality and momentum factors, scoring the stocks in the selection universe and choosing the highest-scoring ones for the portfolio. 

iShares Launches China A Shares Fund

BlackRock’s iShares arm has rolled out its first ETF offering exposure to China’s A-shares market. The iShares MSCI China A ETF (CNYA) tracks an index that covers China A-shares securities that are listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai exchanges. The fund is rolling out on the Bats Exchange, which owns ETF.com. The fund comes with an expense ratio of 0.65%.

Although the market has opened up some recently, the A-shares market has historically only been accessible to Chinese citizens, with foreigners unable to directly invest in it. The A-shares market often moves quite differently than the portion of the Chinese stock market accessible to foreign investors, so access has been highly sought after.

Foreign funds are able to access the A-shares via government-issued quotas. iShares has a quota for CNYA, which means it can invest directly in the equities underlying CNYA’s benchmark index rather than relying on derivatives. While several other A-shares funds have been launched in recent years, iShares has not yet rolled one out prior to CNYA.

The $420 million Deutsche X-trackers Harvest CSI 300 China A-Shares ETF (ASHR | D-66) is the largest A-shares ETF currently available. The fund launched in 2013 and comes with an expense ratio of 0.80%.

Contact Heather Bell at [email protected].

 

 

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