The nascent active exchange-traded fund space, which is currently populated by PIMCO, AdvisorShares and Guggenheim, will soon get a new entrant if it has anything to say about it.
Boston-based Putnam Investments is looking into the active ETF space as another revenue source, according to CEO Bob Reynolds.
Reynolds, who shared his firm’s plans with an audience of fund managers and advisors at the Tiburon CEO Summit XXII in NYC yesterday, said: “I do think there will always be room for active management and the more people who index, the more inefficient the market becomes. ETFs are great trading vehicles but some of them underperform their benchmarks by 1000 basis points.”
He added that “skill always gets paid,” referring to active managers versus their indexing counterparts.
Other firms that have also filed for their own active ETF offerings include BlackRock, State Street Legg Mason, Charles Schwab Corp and, more recently, Pyxis Capital, the rebranded Dallas-based money management firm formerly known as Highland Funds Asset Management.
