February 23 (SeeNews) - The Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) said that it has entered into an agreement with Bulgaria's Expat Asset Management for the licensing of BVB's BET-BK index to be used as underlying for the Expat Romania BET-BK UCITS Exchange Traded Fund [BUL:ROX].
The Expat Romania BET-BK UCITS ETF was launched last month, and has reported great success among Bulgarian investors, the BVB said in a press release on Thursday.
"So far our Romanian ETF has attracted more interest than the ETFs covering Greece, Poland, and the Czech Republic. But the real growth is yet to start," the BVB quoted Expat Asset Management executive director, Nikolay Vassilev, as saying.
"Based on the 16-month experience with our Bulgarian ETF, we would expect the Romanian ETF to reach 50-100 million euro within a couple of years, especially if it is listed on several international exchanges, which is our intention," Vassilev added.
The four ETFs following the blue-chip indices of the stock exchanges in Romania, Greece, Poland, and the Czech Republic started trading on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange on January 17.
Last week, four other ETFs managed by Expat Asset Management were admitted to trading on the Sofia bourse. Each of them tracks the performance of the blue-chip index of one of four stock exchanges in Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. the bourses of Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary.
"We have identified Romania as one of the very attractive markets with strong potential – both in terms of price appreciation and possible new listings," Vassilev said.
"It is a premier for the Romanian capital market that an ETF having as underlying the BET-BK index of the BVB is launched and traded on a foreign trading venue," BVB president of the board of governors Lucian Anghel said.
BET-BK (Bucharest Exchange Trading Benchmark index) is an index launched by the BVB that was designed to be used as a benchmark and underlying by asset managers. It includes the most liquid 25 Romanian and foreign companies listed on BVB’s main market and its calculation methodology accounts for the liquidity of the companies included.