State Street Global Advisors, the asset management business of State Street Corporation (NYSE:STT), has launched the SPDR MSCI World UCITS ETF. The fund is available on the Xetra exchange and will launch on the London Stock Exchange, Borsa Italiana and Euronext on Monday 4 March 2019 and on SIX in due course.
The SPDR MSCI World UCITS ETF offers investors access to a broad basket of over 1,600 stocks across 23 advanced economies. This represents roughly 85 per cent of the float-adjusted market capitalisation of developed equity markets or circa USD40 trillion USD of investible assets.
Global equity ETFs represented approximately 30 per cent of total equity ETF inflows in EMEA year to date, gathering in excess of with USD2.6 billion. The launch of the SPDR MSCI World UCITS ETF complements SPDR’s existing global equity offering, sitting alongside funds including SPDR MSCI ACWI UCITS ETF (SPYY), SPDR MSCI Emerging Markets UCITS ETF (SPYM), SPDR MSCI World Small Cap UCITS ETF (ZPRS) as well as 10 MSCI World Sector ETFs.
Antoine Lesné, head of EMEA Strategy & Research for SPDR ETF, says: “As a transparent and physically replicated solution, the SPDR MSCI World UCITS ETF offers investors a very efficient beta exposure, while the attractive pricing means this fund can be used for long term holdings and a tool for eliminating cash frictions in a portfolio.”
“The MSCI World Index is often considered as the bedrock of a large international portfolio,” Lesné says. “Many investors use it as a core building block around which to build satellite tilts with sector or regional exposures, or blend it with global or regional bond allocations in a diversified portfolio. The MSCI World Index’s high level of both country and sector diversification has historically exhibited better risk-adjusted returns compared to other developed market regional indices.”
State Street Global Advisors has a long heritage of managing broad equity and MSCI World exposures, currently managing USD475 billion of assets benchmarked to MSCI developed world strategies worldwide.
