The latest news in investment offers, financial products and other services relevant to wealth advisors and their clients.

Invesco
US-headquartered investment manager Invesco is expanding its alternatively weighted ETF product range by launching the first UCITS exchange-traded fund (ETF) to track the performance of the MSCI Europe Equal Weighted index. This follows the launch in September 2024 of the first ETF in Europe for exposure to the MSCI World Equal Weighted index. The firm has also recently launched a swap-based equal weight ETF.

Equal weight strategies started growing in popularity when mega-cap valuations began looking stretched, with concentration in the largest holdings at multi-decade highs, the firm said in a statement. This demand has broadened from investors first wanting to reduce concentration risk in their US equity exposure to now considering an equal weight approach for other core exposures.

The Invesco MSCI Europe Equal Weight UCITS ETF will follow an index that includes the same constituents as the parent MSCI Europe index but that equally weights each company at each quarterly rebalance, rather than weighting companies according to market capitalisation. The Invesco ETF will use a physical replication approach to track the index.  

“This latest launch further expands our global market leadership in equal-weight ETFs, a relatively simple, common sense investment strategy that investors have been increasingly turning to over the past year to gain a more balanced approach to broad equity exposure,” Gary Buxton, head of EMEA and APAC ETFs at Invesco, said.

Syz Capital
Syz Capital, the Swiss $2 billion alternatives investment arm of the family-owned Syz Group, has just launched the Syz Capital BTC Alpha Fund, with Coinbase as prime broker and custodian. This pioneering fund of crypto hedge funds taps into volatility, market inefficiencies, and fragmented liquidity to deliver low volatility uncorrelated returns, denominated in bitcoin – a first for any financial institution globally, the firm said in a statement.

Building on the 2023 launch of SyzCrest, the new bitcoin-denominated, market-neutral fund underscores Syz Group’s mission to be a leader in innovations in the digital asset space.

The fund was launched with about 2,000 BTC ($180 million), establishing a new milestone in B Targeting high single digit annual returns with quarterly liquidity. The BTC Alpha Fund balances strong returns with low volatility – which has been designed to be even lower with this portfolio – halving the volatility of the USD fund to 3 per cent. The Syz BTC Alpha Fund will have with no management fees, only performance-based earnings, it aligns Syz Capital’s interests with those of its investors. The minimum investment is 10 BTC.

“Coinbase, the top digital asset custodian for the Wall Street ETFs, impressed us with their security protocols and flexibility to create governance structures, making them the clear choice,” Richard Byworth, managing partner at Syz Capital, said.

“Institutional investors are increasingly looking for secure, compliant, and innovative ways to gain exposure to digital assets, and the Syz Capital BTC Alpha Fund is a prime example of how the ecosystem is evolving,” Lauren Abendschein, vice president, Coinbase Institutional, added. The fund will hard close on 1 April 2025.