Solactive has expanded its Guru family with the launch of the Solactive Guru Activist Index, which has been licensed to be used as the underlying for the Global X Guru Activist Index ETF, listed today on Nasdaq.
The Solactive Guru Activist Index tracks the price movements of US listed equity holdings of a group of activist investors. Activists acquire a company’s shares with the goal of enacting changes in the company’s business policies to unlock additional value for shareholders.
The aim of the Solactive Guru Activist Index is to include the target companies of activist investors that tend to take relatively large stakes in a company in order to enforce substantial changes in their corporate strategy, said Henning Kahre, head of equity indexing at Solactive, in a statement.
“These campaigns are often related to restructuring plans or returning cash to shareholders, among others,” he said.
The selection is based on publicly available documents, the 13F filings that all hedge funds with more than US$100m in US equity investments are required to report to the SEC on a quarterly basis, and the 13D filings that all investors acquiring 5% or more of a company’s shares are required to report to the SEC within 10 days from the date of the transaction.
The Solactive Guru Activist Index is part of the same family as the Solactive Guru Index, launched in June 2012 and tracked by the Global X Guru Index ETF (GURU) which has gathered over US$300m of assets, as well as the Solactive Guru International Index and the Solactive Guru Small Cap Index, both launched in March 2014 and also used for ETFs by Global X Funds.
The Global X Guru Activist Index ETF seeks to provide investors with access to 50 of the top equity holdings of major activist investors in the US. By investing alongside hedge funds and institutional investors, the ETF seeks to benefit from their campaigns to unlock shareholder value, potentially generating excess returns over US equity benchmarks such as the S&P 500, said Jay Jacobs, research analyst at Global X Funds.
“Activist investing is an increasingly popular alpha strategy, but is often limited to investors in hedge funds and other institutional managers,” he said.
In addition, Nasdaq has listed today the Recon Capital FTSE 100 ETF, the only US-listed ETF benchmarked to the FTSE 100 index. The new tracker fund from Recon Capital Partners tracks the performance of the UK’s flagship equity index which can now be traded globally 24 hours a day.
The fund will have an initial expense ratio of 45 basis points, and joins its sister product, the Recon Capital DAX Germany ETF, listed on Nasdaq.
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