According to a study released yesterday by iShares, European exchange-traded products tracking fixed income and commodities have increased their overall market share substantially in recent years.

Over the two-year period ending July 2009, fixed income ETFs increased their share of the overall European ETP market from 13% to 23%, according to the iShares report. Commodity ETPs (diversified ETFs and ETCs, which track single commodities) increased their share of the overall market from 5% to 12% during the same period.

In cash terms, iShares calculates that the European ETP market saw inflows of €41.2 billion during the 12 months ending July 2009, bringing total European ETP assets under management to €137 billion, a new record.

These inflows have been spread quite broadly across a range of ETP sectors, iShares reports. The largest recipients of new funds were regional equity ETFs (€11.3 billion), country equity ETFs (€6.6 billion), fixed income (€6.6 billion), commodities (€6.4 billion) and world country ETFs (€5 billion).

Within the fixed income ETF sector, net new asset flows have been targeted at funds tracking short-maturity government, corporate and inflation-linked debt, with money market funds seeing large outflows.

Within the commodity ETP sector, 73% of net new asset flows were targeted at precious metals trackers, iShares says.

“Non-delta-one” products (ETPs offering an inverse or leveraged return) gathered a modest €1.7 billion of assets over the year. According to iShares, the most recent data show outflows from leveraged ETPs, although simple inverse ETPs (offering minus one times the daily index return) continue to attract inflows.