SSgA Announces New ETF and Indexing Methodology

State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) has launched the SPDR Barclays Capital Issuer Scored Corporate Bond Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF).

The ETF (symbol: CBND) provides access to a new corporate bond indexing methodology, according to SSgA. The company will soon launch its Issuer Scored Corporate Index Strategy to further enhance the firm’s fixed income offering, which includes more than $3811 billion in assets globally.  

Designed to provide an alternative to market value weighted index strategies, the SPDR Barclays Capital Issuer Scored Corporate Bond ETF seeks to track the performance of the Barclays Capital Issuer Scored Corporate Index.  The Index includes publicly issued U.S. dollar-denominated corporate issues that are rated investment grade and have $250 million or more of par amount outstanding.  Individual issuers in the Index are weighted using the following quantitative measures:  return on assets, interest coverage and current ratio.  Rebalancing based on these ratios occurs every six months on the last business day of March and September, the announcement said.    

The SPDR Barclays Capital Issuer Scored Corporate Bond ETF began trading on the NYSE Arca on April 7, 2011, and the SSgA Issuer Scored Corporate Index Strategy will soon be available to eligible institutional investors.

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