Finance

Two China ETFs go on different paths

Published

8 months ago

October 12, 2024

Business Finance News

New approaches to China: Hyper-local or hyper-specific

Two exchange-traded funds are looking for profits in China with two different strategies.

While the Rayliant Quantamental China Equity ETF dives into specific regions, the newly launched Roundhill China Dragons ETF buys the country’s biggest stocks.

“[It’s] focused just on nine companies, and these companies are the companies that we identified as having similar characteristics to magnitude in the U.S.,” Roundhill Investments CEO Dave Mazza told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.

Since its inception on Oct. 3, the Roundhill China Dragon ETF is down almost 5% as of Friday’s close.

Meanwhile, Jason Hsu of Rayliant Global Advisors is behind the hyper-local Rayliant Quantamental China Equity ETF. It has been around since 2020.

“These are local shares, local names that you would have to be a local Chinese person to buy easily,” the firm’s chairman and chief investment officer told CNBC. “It paints a very different picture because China is sort of a different part of its growth curve.”

Hsu wants to give access to names that are less familiar to U.S. investors, but can deliver big gains on par with recent Big Tech stocks.

“Technology is important, but a lot of the higher growth stocks are actually people who sell water [and] people who run restaurant chains. So, often they actually have a higher growth than even many of the tech names,” he said. “There’s very little research, at least outside of China, and they may represent what is more of a thematic in the moment trade inside China.”

As of Friday’s close, the Rayliant Quantamental China Equity ETF is up more than 24% so far this year.

Finance

UK’s FCA teams up with Nvidia to let banks experiment with AI

Published

2 hours ago

June 9, 2025

Business Finance News

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

LONDON — Britain’s financial services watchdog on Monday announced a new tie-up with U.S. chipmaker Nvidia to let banks safely experiment with artificial intelligence.

The Financial Conduct Authority said it will launch a so-called Supercharged Sandbox that will “give firms access to better data, technical expertise and regulatory support to speed up innovation.”

Starting from October, financial services institutions in the U.K. will be allowed to experiment with AI using Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI Enterprise Software products, the watchdog said in a press release.

The initiative is designed for firms in the “discovery and experiment phase” with AI, the FCA noted, adding that a separate live testing service exists for firms further along in AI development.

“This collaboration will help those that want to test AI ideas but who lack the capabilities to do so,” Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, intelligence and information officer, said in a statement. “We’ll help firms harness AI to benefit our markets and consumers, while supporting economic growth.”

The FCA’s new sandbox addresses a key issue for banks, which have faced challenges shipping advanced new AI tools to their customers amid concerns over risks around privacy and fraud.

Large language models from the likes of OpenAI and Google send data back to overseas facilities — and privacy regulators have raised the alarm over how this information is stored and processed. There have meanwhile been several instances of malicious actors using generative AI to scam people.

Nvidia is behind the graphics processing units, or GPUs, used to train and run powerful AI models. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, is expected to give a keynote talk at a tech conference in London on Monday morning.

Last year, HSBC’s generative AI lead, Edward Achtner, told a London tech conference he sees “a lot of success theater” in finance when it comes to artificial intelligence — hinting that some financial services firms are touting advances in AI without tangible product innovations to show for it.

He added that, while banks like HSBC have used AI for many years, new generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT come with their own unique compliance risks.