ETFs making steady inroads into Asia, says SSgA

Asia has been slow to embrace exchange-traded funds (ETFs) , but local investors are warming up to the asset class, using it to gain risk-controlled exposure to specific countries in the region, says Daniel Farley, who heads allocation strategies for State Street Global Advisors’ (SSgA) institutional clients worldwide. The region is home to 318 ETFs, with assets of $84.1 billion in exchange-traded products as of December 2010, far behind Europe’s 1,663 ETFs with $318.5 billion in …