United States Commodity Fund Investments is branching further away from its core commodity theme with two new exchange traded funds that help make it easier to access private equity strategies.
On Friday, United States Commodity Fund launched the USCF SummerHaven SHPEI Index Fund (NYSEArca: BUY) and the USCF SummerHaven SHPEN Index Fund (NYSEArca: BUYN), which both have a 0.95% expense ratio.
“However, the Index does not include, and the Fund does not invest in, private equity funds or private equity of companies,” according to USCF.
Both new funds track newly developed indices based on the research of Harvard Business School Professor, Erik Stafford. The indices are based on Stafford’s 2017 paper titled Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting, which argued that an investor is able to reproduce private equity returns by picking out a portfolio of publicly-traded equities with similar characteristics to the companies that private equity firms are likely to target for investment.