The latest ETF Prime features VettaFi’s Tom Hendrickson and Advisor Perspectives’ Bob Huebscher, discussing their latest combined efforts to better serve the wealth management community. Host Nate Geraci also talks to GraniteShares’ Will Rhind to dig into single-stock ETFs, their history, construction, and use cases, and Motley Fool Asset Management’s Kelsey Mowrey, who offers a tour of their ETF lineup.
VettaFi and Advisor Perspectives Join Forces
With VettaFi acquiring Advisor Perspectives, Tom Hendrickson and Bob Huebscher delivered the inside scoop on their companies coming together.
Speaking about the catalyst for the deal, Hendrickson noted that “VettaFi as a brand is only a short six months old or so, but the capability set that underpins us as a company has decades of lineage.” With S-Network, Alerian, ETF Trends, and ETF Database all under the umbrella of VettaFi, there are actually several storied companies with long histories. Hendrickson sees Advisor Perspectives as further enhancing VettaFi’s reach and its ability to serve the wealth management community. He continued, “what we have done with VettaFi is assemble a very unique and what we believe is a quite valuable set of capabilities. We’ve long admired the business that Bob and his team have built going back to 2007.” Hendrickson sees that data available at VettaFi as being useful for asset managers and advisors alike, with the audience Advisor Perspectives has cultivated likely to derive plenty of value from it.
Huebscher concurred, discussing the history of Advisor Perspectives, particularly its highly vaunted newsletter, which is the most widely read newsletter across the advisor profession. He said, “Our mission is to help advisors enable their clients to reach their financial goals. That’s something our team fully embraces.” He continued, “we’re proud to be part of the VettaFi team.” Explaining the focus of Advisor Perspectives, Huebscher said they are less focused on news of the moment and more on longer term strategic issues. “Everything that we do has to fit into either financial planning, economic, investment, or practice management area.”
Asked why VettaFi and why now, Huebscher said two things stood out for him, “the first is the people.” Noting the integrity of Hendrickson and VettaFi vice chair Tom Lydon, Huebscher indicated that he felt good about the partnership possibilities. The second big reason he saw synergy was the technology available to VettaFi. Huebscher said, “they had some very compelling technology that could help advisors and help asset managers. It allows some data analytics to be applied to the marketing campaigns that asset managers run, and really what it does is it enables asset managers to more appropriately and precisely target their audience. It means for advisors that they are being delivered content and messaging that are relevant to them.
“The one thing that really does ring very true is the culture,” Hendrickson said, continuing, “Bob has been an entrepreneur his whole life and has created an entrepreneurial attitude as it relates to how the business operates day to day. That’s very much in the same ilk as how we strive to motivate and drive forward the VettaFi capability set, and we want to empower people to do things that are innovative.” With a cultural match and complementary capabilities, VettaFi and Advisor Perspectives are well-positioned to help advisors and asset managers meet their needs.
Motley Fool – The Hidden Asset Manager Arm of the Well-Known Brand
Long known for its brand, Motley Fool is also a billion-dollar asset manager, with a suite of 6 ETFs, two of which were recently converted. President Kelsey Mowrey joined Geraci to discuss their offerings. Initially founded to speak the truth about investing and make it accessible to people of all backgrounds and finances, 30 years later, Motley Fool still provides investment advice to people around the world. Mowrey said, “Motley Fool Asset Management was born out of the request from followers of our sister company. They were interested in the stock selecting process and philosophy but didn’t have the time to do it themselves.”
The Motley Fool 100 Index ETF (TMFC) launched in 2018 and is an index-based ETF. It was followed by the actively managed Motley Fool Small-Cap Growth ETF (TMFS). Last year Motley Fool converted its two mutual funds into ETFs and launched two additional ETFs, creating a suite of six funds with over $1 billion in AUM.
Mowrey spoke to the high active share numbers in their active funds, which indicate how much the fund deviates from its benchmark’s holdings.
Single Stocks
GraniteShares Will Rhind joined Geraci for the final segment on single stocks. Though a new phenomenon in the U.S., single-stock ETFs have been around for a while in Europe. “Leveraged ETFs are not a new thing,” Rhind said.
Given the rules in the U.S., GraniteShares couldn’t launch levered products in the U.S., so they focused on Europe. But with the SEC recently allowing any issuer to launch levered products and single-stock ETFs in the U.S., new opportunities are available.
“The most popular products we have on the European platform are the 3x long and 3x short Tesla,” Rhind said, discussing their choices for the initial offerings in the U.S. Apple and Coinbase were their other two choices, due to Apple’s popularity in the U.S. and Coinbase’s ability to act as a proxy for the crypto markets.
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