Synthetic ETFs and their underlying holdings

General
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We’ve had a number of questions regarding the holdings data we show for one of our ETFs,
Lyxor MSCI Semiconductors ETF(SEMG // LU1900066033)

This one is a complicated one. It took a bit of digging into and so I felt it was worth sharing the details…

We’ve had quite a few conversations with our data vendor (Tumelo). They in turn have been directly in contact with the fund manager Lyxor. We received the following information and details back:

“We display the assets that a fund legally holds as opposed to the assets of the index a fund tracks.”

While there’s an expectation that an ETF’s holding will reflex the index it tracks, with synthetic ETFs, such as Lyxor’s Semiconductors ETF, these holding can vary dramatically. This ETF uses a subsitute basket, to replicate index performance.

They’ve also pointed us to Lyxor’s website and holdings listed under the ‘Holdings/Substitute Basket’ for this fund.

Lyxor fund manager website - LU1900066033

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Thanks for this Tom, I was one of those to contact support regarding the holdings list on SEMG.

It’s a shame we have to have the substitute basket shown in IE as it skews the combined holding list & percentage … Which by the way is an awesome feature :slight_smile:

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Is there any way we could get the analysis to change to reflect exposure rather than holdings?

It discourages me from holding synthetic ETFs as one of the reasons I love investengine is the easy analysis tab.

It wouldn’t necessarily have to update the holdings tab (ie. company by company), if you’d just be able to update the geographical & sectors tabs based on exposure rather than holdings.

Appreciate maybe not an easy one to automate, but perhaps something that could be manually updated for the limited amount of synthetic ETFs?

Thanks for this great app!

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