From time to time we like to cover what may be considered obscure, if not completely unrecognized ETPs, many of which are relatively new to the marketplace or simply follow a strategy that the public has not yet embraced.
VLU (SPDR S&P 1500 Value Tilt, Expense Ratio 0.35%) debuted in October of last year, and has very little going on in terms of daily volume or asset flows (475 shares traded on an average daily basis with $7 million in assets under management).
Structured as an “all-cap” product, VLU over-weights stocks in the S&P 1500 Index that have relatively low valuations while under-weighting those in the index with relatively high valuations.
Performance since inception, although it is extremely hard to follow this ETF on a point and figure if not a simple candlestick chart, has been encouraging, although one will note that sometimes the ETF will not trade for days on end at times.
A second ETF in the “S&P 1500” all category that was recently re-branded in terms of symbol and name, is ITOT (iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market, Expense Ratio 0.07%). ITOT as a fund has been around since 2004, and as the name S&P 1500 implies, the index includes all equity components of the S&P 500 (Large), S&P 400 (Mid-Cap), and S&P 600 (Small-Cap) indices.
ITOT has seen a recent pick-up in interest and has a healthy $774 million in assets under management currently, and averages about 115,000 shares traded daily.