The International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) has published its final report on financial benchmarks. The report, entitled ‘Principles for Financial Benchmarks’, offers a framework of principles for the creation and administration of financial indices and benchmarks. The principles are a direct consequence of recent investigations and enforcement actions regarding attempted manipulation of major interest rate benchmarks, most infamously Libor, which raised concerns over the fragility of certain benchmarks, caused by vulnerabilities in their methodology, transparency and governance arrangements.

Liquidity is the subject financial advisors understand the least about exchange-traded funds (ETFs), according to research from Cerulli Associates, a financial services research firm. Advisors often fail to recognise that ETFs offer two different sources of liquidity: traditional liquidity, as measured by secondary market trading volume, and liquidity provided by the creation/redemption process, which reflects the liquidity of the underlying securities within the ETF.

The Nasdaq OMX Group has expanded its Nasdaq Global Index Family, resulting in the launch of an additional 21,000 new indices. The enlarged family represents more than 98% of the global equity investable marketplace and includes in excess of 25,000 separate indices. The family consists of global securities broken down by market segment, region, country, size and sector, covering 9,000 securities with a combined float-adjusted market capitalisation of over $37 trillion.

UBS Global Asset Management has listed a new exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the London Stock Exchange offering exposure to a highly diversified portfolio of developed market equities. Linked to the MSCI World Index, one of the most commonly used benchmarks for global equity funds, the newly launched UBS-ETF MSCI World (USD) “A” (UC55) tracks the performance of large and mid-cap stocks across 23 developed markets countries.

Commodity exchange-traded products (ETPs) saw record outflows in the second quarter (Q2) of 2013, pushing assets down to their lowest level since Q2 2010, according to data from ETF Securities, a London-based provider of exchange-traded funds. Rising real interest rates in the US on expectations of an early end to Federal Reserve bond buying and a strengthening of the US dollar were behind the downturn in sentiment. Gold ETPs bore the brunt of this with $18.5bn of net outflows. The one bright spot was platinum, which saw $712m of net ETP inflows over the quarter.

iShares, the exchange-traded funds (ETF) platform of BlackRock, has announced the launch of two new funds on the London Stock Exchange (LSE): the iShares Global High Yield Corp Bond GBP Hedged UCITS ETF (GHYS) and the iShares Global Corporate Bond EUR Hedged UCITS ETF (CRPH). The two physically-replicated, monthly currency-hedged fixed income funds, the first of their type from iShares, aim to reduce the impact currency fluctuations can have on returns when investing in fixed income assets globally.

Invesco PowerShares, a leading global provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), has launched the PowerShares Global Short Term High Yield Bond ETF (PGHY) on the NYSE Arca. Based on the DB Global Short Maturity High Yield Bond Index, the fund provides investors access to short-term, US dollar-denominated, high-yield debt that is issued globally. Constituents include sovereign, quasi-government and corporate bond securities.

The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) has published the final report on principles for the regulation of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The report contains nine principles intended to guide the regulation of ETFs and foster industry best practices in relation to these products.

Just over a year since formally joining forces, index providers Barclays and MSCI have rolled out the Barclays MSCI ESG Fixed Income Indices, a family of fixed income indices based on environmental, social & governance (ESG) factors. The indices, co-branded Barclays MSCI, combine Barclays’ experience in fixed income indices with MSCI’s strength in ESG analytics and represent the first time ESG considerations have been systematically integrated into bond indices.

As more and more investors lose faith in active managers, they are increasingly turning to a compelling alternative – smart beta. Combining elements of both active and passive management, smart beta strategies have enjoyed significant inflows in the past few years and continue to see growing interest from investors. The latest evidence for this comes from FTSE, a global index provider, which has announced that assets under management in ETFs linked to the fundamentally weighted FTSE RAFI index series have topped $5 billion.