At the end of May, the Canadian ETF industry reached assets under management of $297 billion. The ETF product line-up keeps on expanding with new ESG and sector ETFs, including Canada’s first Shariah-compliant ETF.
Wealthsimple launched the Wealthsimple Shariah World Equity Index ETF. The ETF excludes companies deriving more than 5% of their income from alcohol, tobacco, pork-related products, weapons, conventional banking or insurance companies, and adult entertainment. It also excludes companies with excessive leverage. It currently seeks to replicate the performance of the Dow Jones Islamic Market Developed Markets Quality and Low Volatility Index. The ETF and its underlying index have been certified by a team of Islamic researchers at Ratings Intelligence Partners, and dividend purification information is made available quarterly.
Also in the ESG space, Evolve Funds added new ETFs that bring carbon neutrality to traditional indices. Its CleanBeta suite strives to decarbonize the core of investor portfolios. The Evolve S&P/TSX 60 CleanBeta Fund and the Evolve S&P 500 CleanBeta Fund seek to provide long-term capital growth by replicating, net of fees and expenses, the performance of the S&P/TSX 60 Index and S&P 500 Index, respectively, while striving to offset the carbon footprint of the constituent securities in the portfolio. To achieve this, Evolve will rely on a carbon footprint calculation provided by the S&P Dow Jones Indices utilizing Trucost to determine the carbon exposure of the companies in the indices. The ETFs will employ a variety of strategies, including purchasing and retiring carbon credits, as a means to neutralize the full carbon footprints.
There were no ETF terminations in May.
Kimberly Yip Woon Sun is an investment analyst at Inovestor Asset Management