Franklin Templeton has expanded its roster of active fixed-income exchange-traded funds with its cheapest product in the group—the Franklin Liberty U.S. Core Bond ETF (FLCB).
The fund charges a net expense ratio of 0.15%, and uses fundamental bottom-up bond selection and top-down sector allocation to build a broad-based portfolio of U.S. investment-grade bonds including government, corporate debt, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities.
According to the prospectus, the FLCB fund aims to have sector, credit and duration exposures comparable to the fund’s benchmark, the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index. But the fund’s four-person management team will provide the active touch by using fundamental analysis to decide the fund’s ultimate sector, credit and duration exposures.
The new FLCB fund joins Franklin Templeton’s existing lineup of seven LibertyShares active fixed-income ETFs that invest in a range of strategies and come with net expense ratios from 0.25% to 0.45%.
In terms of assets, the most successful product in this group is the Franklin Liberty Investment Grade Corporate ETF (FLCO), with a market capitalization of $232.8 million. It has a 30-day SEC yield of 2.7% and a net expense ratio of 0.35%.