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December 29, 2017 at 07:39 AM
Last year was supposed to be a banner year for smart beta ETFs in the U.S., but that didn’t happen, according to Morningstar. Inflows into strategic beta ETFs — Morningstar’s term for ETFs for funds focused on specific investment factors — decelerated from the previous year despite the fact that inflows into ETFs overall rose 61% as investors favored plain vanilla market-weighted index ETFs with lower expense ratios.
That focus on lower costs “disadvantages somewhat these newer, more nuanced, more complex and more costly strategic beta ETFs,” said Ben Johnson, Morningstar’s director of global ETF research, in a published interview with Morningstar’s director of personal finance Christine Benz.
(Related: Making the Case for Strategic Beta as Fees Plunge)
It may also disadvantage investors. “If they are to focus on what are ever-smaller differences in fee levels, they run the risk of overlooking the fact that many of the indexes that underpin these funds are going to deliver vastly different outcomes even though they might have similar labels,” added Johnson.
Todd Rosenbluth, senior director of ETF and mutual fund Research at CFRA, takes it a step further. “Understanding an ETF’s performance record or its ability to replicate a unique index does not help investors determine what will happen in 2018. Only a review of the holdings can provide that,” he writes in a recent commentary. Moreover, since those holdings can be reconstituted on a regular basis — the frequency depends on the fund — “further due diligence is required,” says Rosenbluth.
(Related: Goldman Starts Smart Beta ETF Price War)
Rosenbluth, along with other analysts, expect that low-volatility funds will generally outperform other smart beta ETFs in 2018, but advisors should note that the same forecast was prevailed for 2017 and low-vol funds have underperformed this year, largely because there was very little volatility in the market.
