Since the European fund industry is a growth industry, it is not surprising that the number of investment products available to investors in Europe is increasing every year. The new products are products from all asset types and have various investment objectives.

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While some products are real innovations, a high number of new products are enriching the already existing products.

While some investors embrace the increasing number of products since this means that they have more choice for their portfolios, others see an increasing number of products as a hindrance because increased product availability increases complexity of the market. Hence, they have increased their research efforts to find the fund which suits the needs of their portfolios best. This is especially true for new products which are using derivatives or modern portfolio management techniques to realize an asymmetric risk/return-profile or to enhance the returns of a traditional investment strategy.

But there is another advantage which favors investors. If the newly launched products are so-called plain-vanilla products, it is fair to say that more of these like-for-like products increase the competition between product promoters which, as a result, should lead to generally higher product quality and lower management fees.

Especially in the European ETF industry, lower fees are seen as a differentiator between like-for-like products—promoters use lower fees for marketing purposes.

From my point of view, the increasing number of products in the European fund industry is good because it shows that the industry is still in a growth mode and can still create product innovations to foster the demand for new asset classes from investors. This does not mean that all these new products are generally better than the existing products. New investment strategies and/or asset classes, however, may help increase the diversification of investor portfolios, which can lead to better risk/return profiles.

That said, not all products are made for all investors. Highly specialized products, for example, should only be used by investors who understand the instruments used by the portfolio manager and the possible estimated risk/return-profile of the respective product over a given time period or during a given market environment.

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