The four ETFs, listed on Borsa Italiana, are Ucits-compliant and therefore available to investors across Europe. They are also directly linked to fundamentally weighted bond indices.
The funds were first listed on the London Stock Exchange and Swiss SIX Exchange last year and amassed over $225m (£156.9m, €198.4m) in assets under management.
The four funds are: Global Government Bonds; Global Corporate Bonds; Euro Corporate Bonds; and Emerging Market Local Government Bonds.
Covering both government and corporate issuers, the two firms say the new products focus on the borrower’s capacity to repay their debts, rather than their capacity to borrow more money, adding that the ETFs encourage bond investors to “think of themselves as lenders”.
Massimo Siano, head of Southern Europe for ETF Securities, said: “We’re very pleased to be listing these ETFs on the Borsa Italiana. Italy is an important growth market for us and we are fully committed to making our products accessible to all investor types.
“With bond liquidity increasingly being a source of concern for investors, investors in ETFs have extra liquidity support from the secondary market to help mitigate this. This liquidity support coupled with the ability to trade intraday makes the ETF an ideal access route into fixed income at a time when liquidity matters.”
Meanwhile, Jérôme Collet, senior portfolio manager at Lombard Odier, said that quantitative easing coupled with low interest rates is forcing investors to look further a field for yield – urging them to “redesign their fixed income exposure” and to consider the long-term quality and liquidity of bond investments.
He said: “Rather than accessing opportunities through traditional market-cap benchmarks – which tend to reward leverage and can create bubbles, instead focus on the credit quality of liquid issuers at a reasonable price.”
