Today is the fourth anniversary of the start of the Spanish stock exchange’s Traded Funds (ETF) segment. The new segment began on 20 July 2006 with trading in its first ETF, Accion ETF IBEX 35. Over these four years, the performance of ETFs on the Spanish market has been spectacular, with trading rising by 140% from €1.82 billion in the first half of 2006 to over €4.39 billion in the first half of the current year.
With the incorporation of ETFs, BME makes good its goal of contributing to improve the competitiveness of the Spanish securities industry, and cooperating with the financial sector to develop and launch new financial products which meet the demands of issuers and investors.
Investors can access this product, which tracks the performance of indexes and can be bought and sold on the market with high levels of liquidity and transparency. The main feature of an ETF is that its units are traded in real time, just in the same way as any other traded security. It is a product that combines the diversification of a fund - as it is made up of all the shares it tracks – with the flexibility of a share
The volume traded in the ETF segment in June was up 53% on the same month of 2009, standing at €750 million. Meanwhile, the trading volume to the end of June was €4.39 billion, up 188% on the same period a year earlier.
6,762 trades were made in the ETF segment in June, up 83% on the same month in 2009. In the first six months of the year, the number of trades totalled 40,343, up by 85% year on year, and up 342% on the second half of 2006 (between July and December 2006 when 9,129 ETFs transactions were carried out).