A fund that debuted at the beginning of 2010 to serve a niche, physical Platinum exposure, PPLT (ETFS Physical Platinum Shares, Expense Ratio 0.60%) has grown into the tenth largest fund in terms of AUM in the “Commodity” space at this point with about $765 million.
Of course, there are some behemoths such as GLD and IAU for example with their $33 billion and $6.8 billion respectively that rank #1 and #2 in the “Commodity” space well ahead of PPLT in terms of total asset rank, but the growth in this product over time is rather impressive.
PPLT has been a beneficiary recently in strength in the greater “Precious Metals” space, with about a 1% gap up today for instance, but activity in the fund has been rather tame lately.
Year to date, asset flows have been literally flat in the product, but the ETF still remains the largest “Platinum” focused ETP in the U.S. landscape by a mile, with the second largest fund in the space PTM (E-TRACS UBS Long Platinum ETN, Expense Ratio 0.65%), which actually debuted before PPLT in 2008, only holding about $32 million in assets.
PGM (iPath DJ UBS Platinum Trust Sub-Index ETN, Expense Ratio 0.75%) is a smaller offering in the space with about $16.5 million in AUM. An interesting niche play on publicly traded companies that operate in the platinum space is PLTM (First Trust ISE Global Platinum Index, Expense Ratio 0.70%) which also debuted in 2010, and has gathered about $11 million since inception.