(Bloomberg) -- State Street Corp., which opened the first U.S. exchange-traded fund in 1993, is starting its first currency-hedged ETF, following similar offerings from firms including WisdomTree Investments Inc.
The firm’s SPDR EURO STOXX 50 Currency Hedged ETF, which started trading Wednesday, tracks the performance of large-cap stocks in the euro region while seeking to minimize currency fluctuations, the Boston-based firm said in a statement.
State Street follows firms such as WisdomTree, BlackRock Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG, which have raised billions of dollars in assets for their currency-hedge offerings. A WisdomTree Europe fund gathered $13.7 billion in 2015, the most of any U.S. ETF, and a similar offering by Deutsche Bank received $10.4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“Hedging is here to stay,” Nick Good, senior managing director and chief operating officer of the U.S. intermediary business at State Street, said by phone. “With quantitative easing and the general sense of the economy in Europe, and in Germany in particular, there’s been a desire all year for currency-hedged products.”
State Street “would expect” to offer further currency- hedged versions of its existing ETFs in due course, Good said.
