ETF Financial News

Bitcoin (BTC) faces a “torrent” of institutional inflows in the run-up to a United States exchange-traded fund (ETF) approval.

gold buying almost synonymous. People have been buying and investing in gold year after year and generations after generations. The attractiveness of the returns on yellow metal is well established as it is also considered a good hedge against inflation and a good asset class to diversify your investment risk.

XRP (-5%), Dogecoin (-2.8%), and Toncoin (-7%) were trading in the red, while Ethereum (9.7%), Solana (5.5%), Polygon (3.6%), Cardano, and BNB were trading in the green. Meanwhile, the global cryptocurrency market cap increased by 1.8% to around $1.4 trillion in the last 24 hours. At the same time, the market cap of Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency, surged to $253 billion. On Friday, Ethereum experienced a significant surge, surpassing the $2,000 resistance level with a more than 10% increase. This growth was driven after the asset management giant BlackRock registered to create an Ethereum trust, a potential first step toward asking regulators to approve an exchange-traded fund tied to ether, the second-largest digital token. BlackRock registered the iShares Ethereum Trust as a Delaware statutory trust on Thursday. Nasdaq also filed a proposal on Thursday to list and trade shares of the trust.

Bitcoin is finally back to where it traded before the event that precipitated the last crypto crash. The dominant cryptocurrency rose as much as 6.7% to $37,973 on Thursday before paring the gain. That was the highest since May 5, 2022 — just before the TerraUSD stablecoin collapsed and ignited a daisy chain of failures across the cryptoasset space. Bitcoin completed its full recovery from that debacle almost exactly to the year after the rout reached its nadir when Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy. “With Bitcoin trading back above the level when the Terra stablecoin imploded, crypto traders have officially moved on from those psychological scars,” said Markus Thielen, head of research at Matrixport. Unlike in previous boom cycles, Bitcoin staged this year’s recovery in fits and starts, with sharp advances interspersed with long lulls of low volatility. To get here, it had to overcome the steepest monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve in four decades, along with increasingly stringent industry regulations.

Dhanteras today, gold investors would be sitting on near 20% returns accrued by the yellow metal since last Dhanteras. As an asset class, yellow metal has outperformed its equity market peers in Nifty and the BSE Sensex during this period. Gold's returns are neary two-fold in comparison to Nifty and Sensex which have delivered returns of 10.34% and 9.31%, respectively, since last Dhanteras which fell on October 22, 2022.

gold allocation has benefited investors. With returns on gold mutual funds as of October-end close to 20% y-o-y, many of us might have missed the gold rally. But don’t let that dampen the Diwali spirit. Prospects for gold are looking good in the long term, giving you more reason than just the festivities to invest in the precious metal. International gold prices bottomed out in October last year and started moving up slowly over the next six months as the Federal Reserve became less aggressive with its rate hikes. Prices moved up sharply in March 2023 as a regional banking crisis erupted in the US and drove risk assets down. Risk aversion and expectations of Fed cutting rates in response to the crisis were the drivers. But the crisis did not spread to other parts of the economy and gold cooled off in the subsequent months. Meanwhile, inflation remained more than double the Fed's 2% target and US economic indicators were showing resilience, meaning there was more requirement and more room to hike rates. Fed began indicating a hawkish stance again. US yields and US dollar moved up and gold moved lower till September.

UBS Group AG has joined rivals such as HSBC Holdings Plc, in extending an invitation to select clients in Hong Kong to trade specific crypto-linked exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

BlackRock Inc. is looking to launch an exchange-traded fund that would be centered on Ether, helping to spur a rally in the second-largest cryptocurrency. Nasdaq, the exchange that BlackRock is working with on the ETF, on Thursday submitted what’s known as a 19b-4 form, marking the next step in the process to get such a fund launched. The Wall Street behemoth had earlier registered paperwork in Delaware for the fund, according to documents posted to the Delaware Department of State Division of Corporations website. The move marks BlackRock’s second major foray into crypto-centric ETFs after it filed for a Bitcoin spot fund in June. That application helped spur a rally for digital assets and lured other issuers into getting into the race. The price of Ether rose as much as 11% on Thursday, crossing above $2,000 and hitting the highest level since April, data compiled by Bloomberg show. VanEck, Invesco, 21Shares and others have filings for spot-Ether ETFs as well.

By Rae Wee

mutual funds in October jumped 42% over the previous month led by continued investor appetite for small-cap schemes. This marks the 32nd straight month of inflows into equity schemes in the wake of the record-breaking stock market rally. Debt mutual funds too witnessed inflows of ₹43,634 crore after the outflows in September, as corporate treasuries came back to liquid funds with October being the first month of the third quarter of the financial year.

By Suzanne McGee

The third quarter of 2023 saw $111 billion of cash flows into US-domiciled exchange-traded funds with equity ETFs leading investor interest with almost $80 billion even as domestic equities fell 3.3%.

Bitcoin rose to an 18-month high as expectations of an approval for exchange traded funds to invest in the largest crypto token intensified.

The question of whether gold, oil and other commodities are right for individual client portfolios has always been a hard one for financial advisors to mine. So let’s dig into it.

Popular crypto-friendly investment firm ARK Invest has significantly increased its stakes in the commission-free investing app Robinhood.

BlackRock has registered an Ethereum trust in the American state of Delaware, which is possibly a first step toward a spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF). 

By Bansari Mayur Kamdar

Motilal Oswal Financial Services, while sector outlook is important for allocation, bottom-up stock picking has been more profitable in the past year. This trend may continue in the near-medium term, especially with the expected rise in volatility leading up to assembly and national elections. Rajgarhia shared his insights with Mint’s Ram Sahgal in the preparatory to Samvat 2080.

₹16,927.86 crore in October, up 5.5% from the previous month, data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) showed. Small-cap funds witnessed net inflows of ₹4,495.13 crore in October, up 67.8% from a month ago and mid-cap funds attracted net investment of ₹2,408.9 crore, up from ₹2,000.88 crore in September. At ₹723.81 crore large cap funds witnessed inflows for the first time since April.

GST. However, the value of physical gold can truly be realised when you either exchange it for cash or use it to buy jewellery. In the first option, when you exchange the coins for cash, the jeweller will deduct a 3% fee, which brings down the IRR to 6.59%.

Gold holds a special significance as an auspicious metal that can double up as a prudent investment is second to none. Buying gold on the occasion of Dhanteras is considered auspicious but with changing times, the methods of investment have also changed. Now it is not just physical gold that is attracting buyers, there is a growing trend of investing in Digital Gold, ETFs and SGBs, especially during Dhanteras and Diwali. So, you can think about these five methods for investment in Gold this Dhanteras: