What Good Active ETF Management Looks Like

You mentioned you recently launched GBug, which is your active gold and silver miners ETF. What gap in the market does this fund fill, and how does the active management approach add value for investors?

It really comes down to the portfolio management team's over a century of experience. That's something that we don't see in the ETF Raptor for gold miners, since it is the only active strategy. The investment team conducts over 200 management team meetings a year. This is their opportunity to really dig in and understand the management of each of these companies.

In addition, they're also getting boots on the ground, with up to 30 site visits a year. I know some of our PMs are out on the road now visiting mine sites as we record this. These mine site visits allow them to get up close and personal with the mine, but also talk to all levels of employees and management within the organization, so that they can get a full grasp of the overarching picture and how each individual mine site is being operated.

This becomes very helpful when you look at the makeup of our portfolio management team. One of our senior PMs on the fund spent two decades working as an economic geologist, where he would work for mining and exploration companies, and he would lead teams across the globe as they were looking for new mine sites.

So this experience of the entire team really comes together and allows them not only to look at the aspects of how things are going operationally, but when they go back and start to look at their proprietary models, when they're looking at valuation models and sensitivity analysis, it allows them to bring the whole picture together. In particular, the mining sector is notorious for being difficult to value in a lot of cases because there are so many operational complexities. By having this expertise and doing all these site visits and management team visits, it allows them to really dig into the miners and look to get outperformance, which is something that we tend to see a very large dispersion in outperformance among top performers and bottom performers.