Bartels, who’s been at Bank of America for 21 years, joined the research team from the wealth management arm, where she worked for the firm’s chief investment office. The research team has semi-monthly meetings with the CIO’s office, which decides what its financial advisers can buy and sell.
She’s currently focusing on a few large funds -- 109 of about 2,000 in the U.S. -- but plans to boost coverage to 300 ETFs by the end of next year. At the moment her team is just Bartels and Eli Lanik, who’s covered funds for more than a decade. But the firm has resources for more analysts, and in time it wants to offer ETF research on international equities, fixed income, commodities and leveraged products, and segment the work by industries and factors.
Ultimately success comes down to picking which funds will do best in which environments. And the key, Bartels said, is in dissecting the portfolios themselves rather than taking the indexes at face value.
“I came in with the impression that there’s not going to be that much of a difference between ETFs,” she said. “The Street got so focused on this passive stuff that we stopped thinking.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.