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Emerging-Market ETF Gets Record $2 Billion Amid Stocks Bonanza

The longest weekly rally in emerging-market stocks in a year encouraged record inflows into at least one exchange-traded fund.

Emerging-Market ETF Gets Record $2 Billion Amid Stocks Bonanza
Posters depicting a U.S. one hundred dollars banknote, bottom, and a 500-euro banknote are displayed on a wall near a currency exchange in Mumbai, India. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- The longest weekly rally in emerging-market stocks in a year encouraged record inflows into at least one exchange-traded fund in the past two weeks.

Investors piled more than $2 billion into the iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, the second largest emerging-market ETF, in the two weeks through Jan. 18. The fund has risen more than 6 percent this year, fueled by one investor making a couple of massive block trades last week, helping pushing its assets up by about $5 billion to an all-time high of $54.3 billion.

Emerging-Market ETF Gets Record $2 Billion Amid Stocks Bonanza

Developing-nation stocks are up more than 5 percent this year, after falling over 17 percent in 2018, as the appetite for riskier assets improves amid bets the Federal Reserve will pause its tightening cycle and hopes the U.S. and China will reach a trade deal. Cheaper valuations have also contributed to the rebound, with investors including Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS Wealth Management holding bullish calls for emerging-market assets.

--With assistance from Srinivasan Sivabalan.

To contact the reporters on this story: Yakob Peterseil in London at ypeterseil@bloomberg.net;Aline Oyamada in Sao Paulo at aoyamada3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rita Nazareth at rnazareth@bloomberg.net, Philip Sanders

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