Strategic or smart
At the end of December 2018, there were 1,493 strategic-beta ETPs, with collective assets under management of approximately US$797 billion worldwide.
Aside from slowing market share gains, this space is showing other signs that it is maturing, most notably a slowing pace of new product launches and increasing price competition. In 2018, the number of new product launches declined precipitously from the record level set in 2017. There were 132 new strategic-beta ETPs brought to market in 2018, down from 257 in 2017. The decline speaks to the fact that the menu has been saturated. This process of growth and maturation ultimately will lead to a culling of the herd, which has already begun in some countries, albeit to a limited extent.
An increasingly crowded and competitive landscape will also continue to put pressure on fees. We have already seen instances of aggressive fee reductions for strategic-beta ETPs. We anticipate that cost competition in this space will become more prominent in the coming years.
Dividend ETPs Prove Popular
ETPs belonging to Morningstar's dividend strategic-beta group continue to be among the most popular grouping of strategic-beta ETPs in most regions. This should come as little surprise when considered in the context of the prevailing interest-rate environment. Investors around the globe have piled into dividend-paying equities, shunning the low or negative real yields offered by issues from developed-markets sovereigns. Low-volatility ETPs gained market share in Canada, the United States, and Europe in 2018.
As for fees, strategic-beta ETPs tend to charge expense ratios that are more competitive than their comparable actively managed peers, though in some cases only marginally so. That said, in many
Another commonality among the markets we examined is the increasing complexity of the benchmarks that are underlying new ETPs.
This is part of the natural evolution of the market and one that has already played out in the slicing and dicing of traditional