The major shake-up has not gone unnoticed in the ETF industry. Looking at ETF asset flows, FXU added about $1 billion in new assets over the past week while FBT saw about $1 billion in net outflows, according to ETF.com.
When ETFs experience such large trades in a short period of time, the funds will typically experience heavy creation or redemption activity as someone makes makes the trade. The large move, though, was very efficiently executed, writes Dave Nadig, Director of ETFs at FactSet.
“In short, the whole process worked like a well-conducted orchestra, with transparent and immediate impacts from the smallest-affected stocks to the largest parts of the block trade,” Nadig said. “The process of information-signaling worked just like it’s supposed to, and regardless of how First Trust negotiated the trade – either all at once, or as legs, or as in-kind transfers or any combination thereof – the reality is that over $700 million moved out of one set of stocks into another, all for about 10 basis points off VWAP.”
Max Chen contributed to this article.