On the tail end of an extended bull run all the way through the recent pandemic speed bump, exchange-traded fund (ETF) company GraniteShares has managed to defy the odds, accumulating over $1 billion in assets under management (AUM) in just three years.
Founded by experienced ETF entrepreneur Will Rhind, the firm launched its inaugural funds on May 22, 2017, and since then, capitalized off its exponential growth in the ETF space to offer five total investment strategies:
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- The GraniteShares Gold Trust (BAR): seeks to reflect generally the performance of the price of gold. The Shares are intended to constitute a simple and cost-effective means of making an investment similar to an investment in gold.
- The GraniteShares Bloomberg Commodity Broad Strategy No K-1 ETF (COMB): seeks to provide long-term capital appreciation, primarily through exposure to commodity futures markets. The fund is an actively managed ETF that seeks to provide long-term capital appreciation, primarily through exposure to commodity futures markets. While the fund generally will seek exposure to the commodity futures markets included in the Bloomberg Commodity Index, it is not an index tracking ETF and will seek to improve its performance, in part through a cash management strategy consisting of investments in investment grade fixed income securities.
- The GraniteShares Platinum Trust (PLTM): seeks to reflect, at any given time, the value of the assets owned by the Trust at that time less the Trustâs accrued expenses and liabilities as of that time. The Shares are intended to constitute a simple and cost-effective means of making an investment similar to an investment in platinum. An investment in allocated physical platinum bullion requires expensive and sometimes complicated arrangements in connection with the assay, transportation and warehousing of the metal.
- The GraniteShares HIPS U.S. High Income ETF (HIPS): seeks to track the performance, before fees and expenses, of the TFMS HIPS Index. The fund employs a “passive management”-or indexing-investment approach designed to track the performance of the index. The rules-based index measures the performance of up to 300 high income U.S.-listed securities that typically have “pass-through” structures that require them to distribute substantially all of their earnings to shareholders as cash distributions. This “high income, pass-through” strategy is known as HIPS.
- The GraniteShares XOUT U.S. Large Cap ETF (XOUT): seeks to provide investment results that, before fees and expenses, correspond generally to the total return performance of the XOUT U.S. Large Cap Index. The fund seeks to achieve its investment objective by investing, under normal circumstances, at least 80% of its assets (exclusive of collateral held from securities lending) in the securities included in the index. The index utilizes a proprietary, quantitative methodology developed by the index provider, designed to identify companies that have a risk of being disrupted and as a result could underperform their relevant sector.
At the helm of its ETF suite is BAR, which has provided much of the fuel for GraniteShares’ recent growth. Particularly during March’s pandemic sell-off, gold has been a prime safe haven commodity, which has helped BAR swell to over $917 million in AUM.
“During these challenging economic times, we are fortunate to be able to offer ETF strategies that are timely and relevant for investors,” said Rhind, CEO of GraniteShares. “As we enter our fourth operating year, we remain committed to the firm’s founding tenets of offering unique or differentiated investment strategies with lower costs.”
GraniteShares has received multiple industry accolades since the firm’s inception, including ETF.com’s New ETF Issuer of the Year Award in 2018 and ETF.com’s Best New Smart Beta ETF Award this year. In 2019, the firm expanded its operations overseas with the opening of a London office.
GraniteShares’ U.K. offering opened an exciting new category for the ETF industry by launching the first leveraged single stock platform, offering 22 ETPs with 3x leverage (long and short) to large-cap U.K. companies.
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