There are a number of budding ETF providers beginning to peak over the horizon and bidding for the attention of asset managers and financial advisors.
In that vein, 13 funds from 12 providers were featured in a rapid-fire presentation at the Inside ETFs Conference in Hollywood, Fla. on Tuesday.
“These are ETFs with smaller AUM that could make up a portion of a portfolio. We wanted to present them to the advisors here,” said Matt Hougan, CEO of Inside ETFs.
The featured ETFs include the following:
• Emerging Markets Internet & Ecommerce ETF (EMQQ) was one of 2017’s best performing ETFs. The fund has a heavy tilt toward China, but also includes a half-dozen other emerging market countries.
• BlueStar TA-BIGITech Israel Technology ETF (ITEQ) brings Israeli technology companies into a single fund for investors. ITEQ ETF Partners LLC is affiliated with BlueStar Global Investors LLC, a New City-based investment research firm. Under its BlueStar Indexes brand, it develops market and sector indexes focus on Israeli asset classes.
• BUZZ US Sentiment Leaders ETF (BUZ) takes a rules-based, quantitative approach to identify the 75 large-cap U.S. common stocks with the highest positive investor sentiment found on social media networks. Its basic premise is that sentiment is a predictive measure of share price performance, and its underlying index is reconstituted monthly to capture changing stock-specific sentiment.
• American Customer Satisfaction Core Alpha ETF (ACSI) was created to track the performance of the American Customer Satisfaction Investable Index. The index uses proprietary customer satisfaction scores to weight stocks within each sector and includes more than 350 brands, representing over 150 large capitalization securities.
• GraniteShares HIPS US High Income ETF (HIPS) is a high-income ETF that tracks an index of assets that tend to produce high income and pass through that income without being taxed at the constituent level. These include REITs, MLPs, BDCs and debt-based closed-end funds.
• Elkhorn Fundamental Commodity Strategy ETF (RCOM) is an actively managed commodities fund designed to provide total return that exceeds the Dow Jones RAFI Commodity Index through the active management of a short-duration portfolio of highly liquid, high-quality bonds.