Assets under management at HANetf have topped $2 billion, just two months after the firm hit the $1bn mark.

BMO Global Asset Management is to withdraw from the European ETF market. In a letter to shareholders in its ETFs, the asset manager announced its intention to close all of its London-listed ETFs and cease managing ETFs domiciled in Europe. It said the decision was based on a variety of factors, including the current level of assets under management and projected asset growth in the current market environment. The ETF closures raise some important questions with respect to fund due diligence and issuer viability.

WisdomTree has announced changes to its European ETP roster as the firm completes the integration of ETF Securities’ European commodity, currency, and short-and-leveraged ETP business. At the end of September, WisdomTree plans to unify 224 products (including ETFS- and Boost-branded ETPs) under one WisdomTree brand and close 192 duplicative or extraneous products. Alexis Marinof, Head of WisdomTree Europe, said, “The final stage of integration of ETF Securities allows us to be Europe’s leading authority in commodities on top of WisdomTree’s existing strength in smart beta equities, fixed income, and more.”

Societe Generale has launched a series of 74 inverse and leveraged ETPs on London Stock Exchange. The product suite provides investors with leveraged daily long and short exposures to commodities, currency pairs and mainstream equity indices.

By Nick Leung, research analyst at WisdomTree in Europe.

A widening oil spread presents trading opportunities for oil investors. In this brief, we examine how short and leveraged oil ETPs can be used to efficiently trade oil price movements.

By Nizam Hamid, ETF strategist at WisdomTree in Europe.

The upcoming Italian election, scheduled for 4 March 2018, has the potential to revive a risky environment for Italy government bonds, BTPs. Whilst not entirely reminiscent of the 2016 referendum, which highlighted significant constitutional issues and challenges, the election certainly brings an element of uncertainty that investors may do well to prepare against.

This week’s spike in US equity market volatility led to the temporary suspension of trading in three US-listed inverse VIX exchange-traded products and the decision from Credit Suisse to close its VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term ETN (XIV).

By Viktor Nossek, director of research at WisdomTree in Europe.

Leveraged short ETPs that track Bunds can serve as capital-efficient hedging tools for investors seeking to protect their European high-grade bond portfolios in rising interest rate scenarios. The usefulness of such ETPs is particularly relevant in the current environment, with the European Central Bank (ECB) recently announcing that it will begin tapering its quantitative easing (QE) programme.

By Jason Guthrie, director of capital markets at WisdomTree in Europe.

Misconceptions about ETPs are common and one is around an ETP’s available liquidity. Although the ability to trade ETPs intraday is well known, many institutional investors believe ETPs aren’t tradeable in institutional size. The reality, however, couldn’t be further from this belief.

Ten new ETFs and 27 ETPs were listed on London Stock Exchange in December 2017, making it exchange’s busiest month of the year for new listings. On-exchange ETF/ETP trading, however, was down for the month and broadly flat for the year.