DoubleLine Capital LP — known for its prowess in the fixed-income universe — is launching another stock-focused fund.
The DoubleLine Fortune 500 Equal Weight ETF began trading Thursday under the ticker DFVE, according to a press release. Unlike popular market-capitalization strategies, every stock in the fund will carry the same weight.
The new fund launches into a stock market dominated by a handful of giant technology companies, which have largely powered the stock market’s gains over the past several years. That top-heaviness has set off alarm bells, with JPMorgan Chase & Co. warning this week of a dot-com level of concentration risk in US stocks. Against that backdrop, it makes sense that an issuer like DoubleLine would be looking to offer a diversification product, according to Strategas.
“When I hear DoubleLine, I think fixed income,” said Todd Sohn, an ETF strategist at Strategas, but “there’s opportunity to bring an equal-weight equity strategy to their clients to expand their product set. Particularly when you have five stocks at 25% of weight, that’s major concentration risk — that to me is really the catalyst.”
Equal-weight strategies have grown in popularity recently despite consistently lagging market-cap indexes when it comes to performance. The $49 billion Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (ticker RSP) attracted a record $7.6 billion of inflows last year, even though its 12% rally trailed the S&P 500’s 24% gain.
DoubleLine chief executive Jeffrey Gundlach is listed as the fund’s manager alongside deputy chief investment officer Jeffrey Sherman. DFVE charges 0.2% annually.
In addition to DFVE, the DoubleLine Commodity Strategy ETF also began trading on Thursday under the ticker DCMT. With the new debuts, DoubleLine now manages six ETFs with more than $900 million in assets.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.