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 that over a century of experience that the portfolio management team has. 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 actually conducts over 200 management team meetings a year. So 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 where they're getting up to 30 site visits a year. And I know some of our PMs are actually out on the road now visiting mindsets as we record this. These mindsite visits allow them to get up close and personal with the mind, 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 mind sites are 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 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. And just one last point on this in particular to the mining sector. It's an industry that's 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.
