We have been covering ETFs with an active management bent in recent columns here, and today we stick with that theme but shift over to the Fixed Income markets.
SRLN (SPDR Blackstone GSO Senior Loan, Expense Ratio 0.90%) debuted just over a year ago in early April of 2013 and already the fund has gathered about $619 million in assets and averages greater than 100,000 shares traded daily.
“Blackstone/GSO” likely is a very familiar name as far as investment managers are concerned, with many whom are already involved in the fixed income markets via mutual fund or closed end fund exposure, and SRLN according to fund literature, “invests substantially all of its assets in the Blackstone/GSO Senior Loan Portfolio, a separate series of the SSGA Master Trust with an identical investment objective as the Fund.”
Benchmark indexes for SRLN are labeled as the Markit iBoxx USD Liquid Leveraged Loan Index, as well as the S&P/LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan 100 Index and this ETF falls in the greater “High Yield Bond” category, which of course has been a notable net winner in recent years in terms of attracting and retaining new assets from investors, and where actively managed approaches have often risen up the ranks impressively in terms of gathering assets (as in the case of not only SRLN but HYLD (Peritus High Yield, Expense Ratio 1.25%), FTSL (First Trust Senior Loan, Expense Ratio 0.85%), and SNLN (Pyxis/iBoxx Senior Loan, Expense Ratio 0.55%) for example).
SRLN has a 30 Day SEC Yield of 3.23% and recently traded rather high volume for the fund last Friday on what looks like some brief selling pressure in the product.