Deka Investments has launched the Deka MSCI World UCITS ETF (ELFW GY) on Deutsche Börse’s Xetra.

The MSCI World Index provides exposure to over 1,600 large and medium-sized companies from 23 industrialised countries.

The ETF provides exposure to the MSCI World Index, a well-known reference for the performance of global developed market equities.

The index comprises over 1,600 large and medium-sized companies from 23 industrialised countries, covering 85% of the total market capitalisation of the included countries.

Stocks from the US account for 62.1% of the total index weight, with the next largest country exposures being Japan (8.3%), the UK (5.9%), France (3.8%) and Canada (3.4%).

Information technology and financials are the two largest sector exposures with weights of 19.3% and 16.6% respectively, followed by health care (12.7%), consumer discretionary (12.7%) and industrials (11.2%). The largest constituent is Apple with a weight of 2.8%.

The fund trades in euros and comes with a total expense ratio (TER) of 0.30%. Income from the fund is distributed to investors.

Deka has likely launched the fund in response to existing client demand and to satisfy the requirements of in-house portfolio management units.

It will compete with a number of longstanding and well-established funds tracking the same index, including products from BlackRock, Amundi, Lyxor, UBS, Invesco, and HSBC.

The largest European domiciled fund by far is the iShares MSCI World UCITS ETF (IQQW GY) with $6.0 billion in assets under management. It is however also the most expensive with a TER of 0.50%. The cheapest is the HSBC MSCI World UCITS ETF (HMWO LN) which costs just 0.15%. Its AUM is around $650m.