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A fairly quiet batch this week, apart from a couple of things that made me put my coffee down.
AWEG, ALLG, and WIMG (Xtrackers, LSE, all three at once)
Xtrackers landed three global equity ETFs in the same batch: a full MSCI World (WIMG), an FTSE All-World (ALLG), and an FTSE All-World ex-US (AWEG). All priced at 0.12% TER, which is genuinely competitive. Classic DWS: pick a category, undercut the market, file the paperwork.
The one I keep coming back to is AWEG. An ex-US fund is, at its core, a bet that the US equity premium is either fully earned or possibly getting a bit full of itself. For most of the last decade that was a lonely position to hold. You'd mention it at a conference and people would nod politely and talk about something else. Then tariffs happened, the dollar softened, and suddenly the whole market is asking the same question. AWEG turns up at exactly this moment, like someone who's been making the same point for years and has finally been proved right at the worst possible time to say “I told you so.”
Whether the ex-US trade actually plays out is above my pay grade. The timing is not.
GIBO (Goldman Sachs Global Income Bond Opportunities Active UCITS ETF, SIX)
Goldman has been building out its active ETF range for a while now, so GIBO is not a surprise exactly. More of a “yes, and” from a firm that has clearly decided active UCITS is a category worth taking seriously.
GIBO is an actively managed bond fund listed on the Swiss Exchange, hunting for income across global fixed income markets. The active fixed income ETF space is genuinely growing, and Goldman's track record of finding yield when other people can't is the kind of thing that sells itself. The interesting question is how they run it in practice. Goldman being Goldman, I'd expect the holdings list to be more eventful than the name suggests. I'd be curious to look in six months.
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