We are quite certain that most if not all of our audience has heard of, and perhaps invested with Calamos Investments at one point or another as, they are a well-known mutual fund (and closed end fund) manager with a dozen plus mutual funds and five CEFs and substantial assets under management.
We are also fairly certain that many are not aware that Calamos is now part of the ETF industry as an active issuer following the July 2014 launch of CFGE (Calamos Focus Growth ETF, Expense Ratio 0.90%). The fund trades very light volume on most days, but then again we have less than two months of live trading history to reference thus far, but there have been several larger volume days since inception, mostly occurring at the end of July and early August, fueling the asset inflows that the ETF has seen thus far.
At about $26 million in AUM currently, the ETF still has some work to do in competing with the size of some of the well-known and more established Calamos mutual fund offerings such as CVGRX (Calamos All Cap Growth, Expense Ratio 1.26%) and CVTRX (Calamos Core U.S. Equity, Expense Ratio 1.09%) which have approximately $3.7 and $3.2 billion in AUM respectively currently.
The fund provider’s website is rather well put together and has a white paper titled “The Growing Case for Actively Managed ETFs” and it is clear that Calamos has plans as a firm to be involved in the ETF industry from the actively managed standpoint, and we imagine this will encompass not only managed equity strategies but fixed income ones as well.
When we take a closer look at the lone ETF on the market thus far, CFGE, we see a large cap concentration and an actively managed style, and fund literature details that management puts together the portfolio sensitive of
“only those large cap stocks in which we have the greatest confidence of sustained growth” and company fundamentals are emphasized within this portfolio strategy as well.