Latest ETF market update for August 2021

With the latest ASX data out on Wednesday it's time to look at what's happened in the ETF markets. We can now do this with our latest ETFtracker app where we have a new landing page, ETF snapshots and other features in the mix.

Here's an example of a user navigating the app to explore more:

What happened overall

The market grew to just under $123 billion and added 3 new ETFs (SEMI from ETF Securities, MHHT from Magellan and GCAP from VanEck) taking the total nubmer to 240. The screen below shows the number of ETFs dip in August (against growing FUM) but that's because we only have data from ASX with Chi-X due out in a few days.

We can also see that average returns were +2.24% and this is up on the previous month (all the triangles in the KPI section below show whether the metric is higher or lower than the previous month). The growth in FUM was driven by $3.5 billkion of inflows and 479k trades occurred in August (a trend up but still below the record 770k set in March 2020).

Who performed best and worst

Going deeper, we can see that top performers for August were ATEC (BetaShares Australian Technology ETF) at +14% followed by ETF Securities Long Nasdaq leveraged ETF (LNAS) and BetaShares robotics ETF (RBTZ) as well as Indian ETF plays NDIA/IIND coming in after them.

Worst performers in August were the leveraged bearish plays but as we mentioned, the market was mostly up.

Where did the money go?

We can see that the new Magellan listing of MHHT had the most inflows at $1 billion, followed by VGS, VAS and HYGG.

What got traded the most

In terms of trades, the most went to the Vanguard ASX 300 play (VAS) followed by NDQ, VGs and IOZ with ETHI not far behind.

What's in the ETF Snapshots

Looking at the newest ETF Snapshots feature we can doa quick analysis of some of the interesting ETFs for August. Starting off with ATEC which had the best returns.

Navigating to the ETF Snapshot page and using the dropdown to select ATEC, we can see that its returns profile is going from strength to strength. This is despite little in terms of inflows going to it for the month. Transactions wise, it's still trading steadily with latest data showing 1.6k trades in the month of August with a value of $15 million traded (an average parcel size of just under $10k). We can also see its bid ask spread has been decreasing showing its getting easier and easier to trade this ETF and its historical distribution yield was higher in July and August.

Another ETF we can look at is VGS (Vanguard MSCI International Shjares ETF) which had strong inflows in August (amongst the top 3 ETFs).

This one has been out longer than ATEC and we have data going back to 2017. It's seeing strong returns over that time and has had its biggest amount of net inflwos in the last 2 months along with strongly trending transactions. Now this ETF can be bought on its own but also sits within other Vanguard ETFs (like VDHG, VDGR, VDCO, VDBA) so popularity of those can also contribute towards VGS (kind of like preference voting). It's bid ask spread has been improving but distribution yield is on the decline. It's got a lower MER than many other ETFs and that's been flat across the period we've got data for it.

If you're interested in exploring other ETF snapshots or other data in this app you can do so here: https://www.etftracker.com.au/the-app

We also do ETF holdings analysis where you can compare ETFs to check for holdings similarity or search for particular holdings to see which ETFs they have exposure to. Check out those apps here: https://www.etftracker.com.au/holdings