Fernando Rodríguez | The weight of foreign funds and Sicav has increased from 8.1% to 45.4% of the total invested in the last fourteen years, according to the comparative analysis of profitability and costs between Spanish CIIs and foreign CIIs marketed in Spain published in the latest quarterly bulletin of the CNMV. “In this period, the assets of foreign CIIs have multiplied by 16, from 18,000 million at the end of 2008 to 294,095 million euros at the end of 2021,” the analysis concludes.
In recent years, Spanish investors have increasingly channelled their savings into Spanish and foreign collective investment vehicles, with a cumulative volume of 353,203 and 294,095 million euros, respectively, at the end of 2021. At the same date, participants reported to the CNMV in domestic and foreign collective investment undertakings (CIIs) amounted to 16.2 and 6.1 million respectively.
Based on the last four years, foreign funds outperform their domestic comparators in all categories, although things are less conclusive when looking at expenses.
According to this work, “the analysis of performance, calculated in annual terms on the basis of year-end net asset values, reveals that the performance of foreign CIFs has been higher than that of Spanish CIFs (on average over the period) in all the investment categories considered. The average annual difference ranged from 0.2 percentage points (p.p.) in mixed funds to 7.1 p.p. in equity funds. In the other categories, the differences are 0.3 p.p. in money market funds, 1.2 p.p. in fixed income and 1.9 p.p. in alternative funds.
The results obtained in terms of expenses “are mixed” and the differences are blurred. Thus, “foreign CIS have a lower expense ratio than Spanish CIS in the money market and equity categories (with a difference of 0.06 p.p. and 0.24 p.p. on annual average, respectively), while in the fixed income, mixed and alternative categories they have higher expenses than Spanish CIS (0.18 p.p., 0.29 p.p. and 0.06 p.p. more, respectively)”.
