New Listings: A Catholic Values Fund Turned Up and Its Exchange Page Talks Only About Carbon

Two faith-screened equity funds have appeared on the ASX, and the official record for one of them manages to describe its entire investment universe without mentioning faith once.

Betashares Global Shares Catholic Values ETF (GECV, ASX) and its Australian sibling (AECV, ASX)

Betashares has brought two Catholic values funds to market, one Australian and one global. Both charge 0.85% a year. The same house charges 0.04% for its flagship broad Australian equity tracker, and while a screened global portfolio is a different animal from cap-weighted domestic beta, it is still worth knowing what conviction costs.

The Australian version runs 74 holdings against no benchmark at all, selected by a rules-based methodology that excludes companies failing certain faith-based and responsible investment criteria. Fair enough. That is a coherent product with a coherent description.

The global version is where the record stops matching the fund. Its exchange listing describes an eligible universe of developed market companies identified as climate leaders on the basis of carbon efficiency relative to industry peers. Carbon. Not contraception, not armaments, not embryonic stem cells. Carbon.

The portfolio itself looks screened. Healthcare sits at a little over one percent against a category average north of ten, which is roughly what happens when you exclude companies involved in contraception and embryonic stem cell research. So the holdings suggest a faith screen is doing real work. The official description of the investment universe does not mention faith at all. Will keep looking at this one as more details emerge.

Value Partners Optical Communication Active ETF (2811, HKEX)

Value Partners built its reputation over decades as Asia's archetypal deep-value manager, the house that bought cheap things and waited. It has now launched a single-theme, actively managed, entirely unbenchmarked fund devoted to companies that derive most of their revenue from optical transceivers, fibre and networking equipment.

Management fee 0.99%, estimated ongoing charges 1.50%. No index, no comparator, nothing to be measured against except the theme itself. The fund's own risk disclosures concede the obvious problem, which is that many optical communication companies are small, narrow, and thinly resourced. That is not a criticism of the product. It is a rather admirable piece of honesty buried in a document nobody reads.

They are also doing it again. A Printed Circuit Board Active ETF is sitting on the same shelf, unlisted for now. The AI supply chain is being disassembled component by component, and the components are getting smaller.

CSOP Pioneer Tech Index ETF (3149, HKEX)

This one tracks the Hang Seng Pioneer Technology Index, which the index provider describes as innovative technology companies driving breakthroughs with strong sales growth, listed in Hong Kong. Thirty constituents, heavily weighted towards robotics, autonomous driving, domestic AI chips and large-language-model developers, a good number of which reached the public markets very recently.

Here is the thing. The index page still lives at a web address built from the words “innovative technology”. Pioneer is not a methodology. Pioneer is what happened when somebody decided that “innovative” had stopped selling.
CSOP now runs a Hang Seng technology fund, a Hong Kong and US technology fund, a Hong Kong and Korea technology fund, a bottleneck fund, and this. At some point the shelf stops being a product range and becomes a taxonomy of the same idea, arranged by adjective.

BNP Paribas Easy Bloomberg Europe Defense UCITS ETF (GUAU, London Stock Exchange)

A European defence tracker, now cross-listing in London after gathering over half a billion euros elsewhere, charging thirty-five basis points to hold companies engaged in the military and defence industry.

The ticker in Paris is GUARD. Not STRIKE, not ARMS, not the name of a weapons platform. GUARD. There is an entire school of communications strategy compressed into five letters.

I have no argument with the fund. European defence spending is real, the companies are real, and somebody was going to wrap them. What stays with me is the shelf it sits on.  The same issuer, like most of its peers, sorts its ETF range into neat categories, among them Paris-Aligned Benchmark funds and ESG-enhanced funds. A product menu can hold a carbon-aligned tracker and a defence tracker at the same time without visible strain, and that is not hypocrisy. That is just what a full-service platform looks like once every client has been given what they asked for.

Xtrackers MSCI EAFE 50% Hedged Equity ETF (EAFH, NYSE)

The currency hedging debate has raged for as long as anyone has held foreign equities. Hedge, and you give up the diversification the currency provides. Don't hedge, and you own a view on the dollar you never intended to take.
DWS already offered the unhedged answer and the fully hedged answer. It has now added the 50% answer, tracking an index that hedges exactly half of its foreign currency exposure, for twenty basis points.

I want to be clear that this is defensible. Half-hedging is genuinely the academic middle ground, it minimises regret, and there are serious papers arguing for it. It is also, unmistakably, the sound of a committee that could not agree. Nought, fifty, and one hundred, all available, all from the same issuer. Pick the one that matches your conviction, or the one that matches your lack of it.