As you know, we are always looking to improve our offering. Whilst this can take a variety of forms, recently we identified a way to reduce our starter portfolios’ costs (i.e. Total Expense Ratios or “TER”) by introducing a new instrument to represent the index-linked government bond ETF for those who have invested in euros.
To be specific, we will be gradually replacing the iShares Euro Inflation Linked Government Bond UCITS ETF with the UBS Bloomberg Barclays Euro Inflation Linked 10+ ETF. The iShares instrument is 0.05% more expensive with a TER of 0.25%, whilst the UBS has a TER of 0.20%. The new instrument will also extend the weighted average maturity of the underlying bonds from 8.90 to 16.14 years.
The guidelines we use to select ETFs can be found under section 4.1 in our White-paper.