Tradeweb has reported that fixed income ETFs saw net buying activity on its European-listed ETF marketplace during August with ‘buys’ outperforming ‘sells’ by six percentage points.

Total traded volume on the Tradeweb European-listed ETF marketplace exceeded €11.8bn in August.

Fixed income was the only ETF asset class to see net buying during the month; ‘sells’ outstripped ‘buys’ for equity ETFs by eight percentage points while commodity ETFs were equally balanced between ‘buys’ and ‘sells’.

Notional volume executed on the platform was just shy of €11.8 billion during the month. Activity in equity ETFs amounted to 64% of the entire platform flow, beating the previous 12-month rolling average by four percentage points.

Source: Tradeweb.

August’s list of the ten most heavily-traded ETFs mainly comprised equity products, with the db x-trackers MSCI World Index UCITS ETF ranked first. This finding, combined with the preference for selling equity ETFs in August, indicates investors sought to reduce broad systematic risk from their portfolios during the month.

The fund tracks the performance of the MSCI Total Return Net World Index, which aims to represent 85% of the readily available shares in each industry sector in 23 developed countries. It has €2.2bn in assets under management and a total expense ratio (TER) of 0.45%.

Source: Tradeweb.

The month also saw the addition of the 19th dealer posting axes to the platform. Adriano Pace, managing director for equity derivatives at Tradeweb, explains: “More than 11,000 live ETF axes are provided daily to Tradeweb by a constantly growing number of market makers. The Tradeweb axes functionality enables traders to select the most relevant dealers to put into competition for each trade, not only improving access to liquidity, but also resulting in meaningful pricing improvement.”