BlackRock, the parent of ETF issuer iShares, has released its mid-year investment outlook report for 2015. The paper details the firm’s insights into the current investment climate which it notes is characterized by a divergence in global central bank monetary policy and asset prices. Several key considerations are highlighted: the re-emergence of fundamentals rather than monetary stimulus as drivers of portfolio returns; indications of lagging productivity and heady asset valuations in certain regions; the possibility of continued equity returns in carefully chosen markets; and renewed confidence in emerging market’s ability to withstand the impact of upcoming policy tightening by the Federal Reserve.

Technology ETFs enjoyed a steady rally last week, culminating in a strong surge on Friday owing to better-than-expected earnings from internet giant Google. The PowerShares EQQQ Nasdaq-100 UCITS ETF (EQQQ), which tracks the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index, was helped to a record high on Friday after gaining 5.1% over the week. Technology stocks – and thus ETFs linked to them – have fared relatively well this year, backed by strong fundamentals, including solid Q1 earnings numbers. With Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all set to deliver solid Q2 numbers, tech ETFs could be poised for a further move higher.

Keefe Bruyette & Woods (KBW), a specialist financial sector investment bank, and the index division of exchange operator Nasdaq have teamed up to launch the KBW Nasdaq Global Bank Index. The index is designed to track the performance of those banks designated as global systemically important (G-SIBs) by the Financial Stability Board and Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The index acts as an important gauge on the health of the global banking sector and is also a suitable basis for index-linked investment products such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

PureFunds, a US-based provider of thematic exchange-traded funds, and index provider ISE ETF Ventures, have announced the launch of the PureFunds ISE Mobile Payments ETF (NYSE Arca: IPAY) and the PureFunds ISE Big Data ETF (NYSE Arca: BDAT). The two New York-listed ETFs offer targeted exposure to mobile payments and data companies, allowing investors to express views on the growth potential of these two specialist sectors. “These two technology sectors are transforming traditional commerce and data management, and their solutions are bringing exciting changes to everything from how we pay for a cup of coffee to how we access and interpret vital information,” said Andrew Chanin, CEO of PureFunds.

WisdomTree Europe has cross-listed its USD-hedged European (HEDJ) and Japanese (DXJ) equity ETFs on the SIX Swiss Exchange. Viktor Nossek, the firm’s director of research, commented: “Continental European and Japanese equity markets continue to benefit from the ECB’s and BoJ’s quantitative easing program, which has triggered the devaluation of the euro and the yen and is playing into the hands of export-oriented companies whose stock prices have risen on the back of it. HEDJ and DXJ are designed to offer investors exposure to European and Japanese exporters respectively, while seeking to offer protection against downside risk from the euro and yen depreciating relative to the dollar.”

One of the toughest challenges facing smart beta investors today is in determining how these strategies will perform over changing market environments. A new research paper from Scientific Beta offers investors guidance on what to look for when assessing ETFs and indices based on these strategies. According to Scientific Beta, their publication “highlights the importance of a limited choice of factors with simple definitions to avoid the temptations of factor mining or factor fishing, which are among the main causes of the lack of relative out-of-sample robustness of smart beta strategies that are based on factor exposures. It also underlines the importance of allocating between smart factors that have decorrelated excess returns with respect to cap-weighted indices in order to favour the absolute robustness of the smart beta strategies implemented.”

With a deal having been reached between the Greek government and Eurozone leaders, and swift action by Chinese authorities managing to subdue the slide of China’s A-Shares, stability is beginning to return to the commodity markets. ETF Securities’ latest weekly commodity ETP report suggests that commodity flows will now shift away from speculative trading and back to fundamentally-based principles, such as long-term industrial growth rates.

Heavy inflows into currency-hedged ETFs this year and last bear witness to the undeniable popularity of strategies which mitigate currency risk, especially for dollar-referenced investors. According to S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI), a leading provider of indices, investors are right to be considering currency management and this is particularly pertinent in the near to medium term for USD investors. Aye Soe, Senior Director of Research and Design at S&P DJI, commented: “For a USD investor, currency hedging has long been part of fixed income portfolio management, as currency volatility plays a significant role in international bond returns. However, it is not as prevalent in equity investing. That has been changing as the spreads between hedged international equity portfolios and unhedged international equity portfolios has widened considerably in recent months, and they may widen even more, all else being equal, if other major currencies continue to weaken relative to the US dollar.”

Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management (Deutsche AWM) has launched Europe’s first ETF to provide investors with physical exposure to China’s domestic sovereign bond market. The db x-trackers II Harvest CSI China Sovereign Bond UCITS ETF (DR), which has been listed on the Deutsche Börse with a London Stock Exchange listing to follow, is a physical replication ETF that tracks the CSI Gilt Edged Medium Term Treasury Note Index, an index reflecting the performance of tradeable Renminbi-denominated medium-term debt issued by the government of the People’s Republic of China.

London-based bank Barclays has partnered with economist Nouriel Roubini and his Roubini Global Economics research firm to launch a suite of smart beta equity indices: the Roubini Barclays Country Insights Indices. As tradeable strategy indices, the suite is ideally suited to underlie index-linked investment products such as exchange-traded funds. The engine behind the new indices is the “Roubini Country Insights” model, which measures country risks and opportunities via a systematic rules-based approach. This approach consistently ranked Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain in the bottom four of Eurozone countries according to their investment attractiveness as far back as September 2005.