Eaton Vance’s (NYSE: EV) Eaton Vance Asset Management Thursday gained approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission for exchange-traded managed funds (ETMFs), a type of exchange traded product that does not disclose its holdings on a daily basis as most passively managed ETFs do.
The SEC’s decision to allow Eaton Vance to proceed with ETMFs is a reversal from the Commission’s October rejection of applications by Precidian ETFs Trust and Spruce ETF Trust, a unit of BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), to offer active non-transparent ETFs. [SEC Rebukes Active Non-Transparent ETFs]
The sticking point for the SEC with the Precidian and BlackRock products was the proposed fashion in which those would have traded, if they had come to life. “The difference in Eaton Vance’s fund structure appears to be in the way fund shares will trade, which was a concern in the other company filings,” reports Kirsten Grind for the Wall Street Journal, citing Eaton Vance.
Eaton Vance’s ETMFs would allow for a scenario where market makers would buy or sell shares based on the so-called proxy price that represents the fund’s end-of-day net asset value or NAV-based trading.
The Eaton Vance ETMFs will trade under the NextShares brand.