Invesco PowerShares Managing Director Dan Draper, Vice President of ETF Product Management John Feyerer and Senior Equity Product Strategist Nick Kalivas joined ETF Trends publisher Tom Lydon at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago to discuss the growth and advantages of low volatility and other smart beta strategies.
PowerShares issues one of the largest low volatility ETFs, the PowerShares S&P 500 Low Volatility Portfolio (NYSEArca: SPLV). In just over four years on the market, SPLV has amassed nearly $4.7 billion in assets under management. Over the past year, SPLV has hauled in $357.3 million in new assets.
“Volatility is on the minds of investors for obvious reasons,” said Feyerer. “Since we launched the first ETF in the space, we’ve seen tremendous interest. What we’ve begun to dig into is the research around the low volatility factor. We really look at low volatility as a factor right along the traditional Fama-French value, momentum and the like.”
As ETF Trends recently reported, SPLV, which some investors previously thought was a utilities ETF in disguise, now features a scant weight of just 2.8% to utilities stocks. That is good for the ETF’s second-smallest sector weight. On the other hand, financial services stocks are 35.6% of the ETF’s weight.
Watch the video below to see the full interview.
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