SPUS has an expense ratio of 0.49%.
Faith-based investing is often lumped into the socially responsible investing category. While still a tiny subset of the overall investing universe, it has slowly gained momentum in ETF circles during the past couple of years with the roll out of biblically inspired funds from Inspire Investing (five products) and Timothy Partners Ltd. (four products).
The largest and oldest U.S.-listed ETF focused on Christian values, the Global X S&P 500 Catholic Values ETF (CATH), is a large-cap domestic fund that follows the guidelines of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
It launched in 2016 and has more than $303 million in assets. Its three-year annualized return of 15.06% is just a hair less than the 15.08% gain on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) during that period.
The expense ratio on CATH is 0.50%, which is significantly more than SPY’s fee of 0.09%. But that evidently doesn’t matter much to people who seek investments deemed to be aligned with Catholic principles.
In the non-biblical sphere of faith-based investing, the two new products from SP Funds join an existing Islamic-themed ETF that debuted last July—the Wahed FTSE USA Shariah ETF (HLAL).
HLAL is sponsored by Wahed Invest LLC, a Sharia-compliant robo-advisor in New York City. The fund tracks an index comprising U.S. large- and mid-cap companies deemed to be Sharia-compliant based on their business activities and certain financial ratios. Potential candidates for the index are screened by Yasaar Ltd, a London-based Sharia compliance services and consultancy to financial institutions.
That fund has more than $23 million in assets and charges an expense ratio of 0.50%.