Goldman Sachs Files for Pair of Large and Midcap ETFs

The issuer seeks to offer passively managed funds as ETF demand surges.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the asset manager with $30 billion under management in its 36 ETFs, filed on Tuesday to launch a pair of new exchange-traded funds, tapping into increased investor demand as the firm aims to ramp up its variety of ETF offerings.  

The Goldman Sachs MarketBeta Large Cap Growth Equity ETF will track the performance of the Large Cap Growth 40 Daily Capped Index and invest at least 80% of its assets in securities in the underlying index. The fund tracks equity securities of “large and mid-capitalization U.S. equity issuers with higher price-to-book ratios and higher forecasted growth revenues,” according to the fund’s prospectus. The ETF will not be actively managed, according to the filing.  

The Goldman Sachs MarketBeta Large Cap Value Equity ETF will invest in large and midcap stocks of companies with “lower forecasted growth values based on a combination of their market capitalization and current index membership,” according to the fund prospectus.  

While New York-based Goldman Sachs is no newcomer to the ETF game, launching its first in 2015, it lags industry titans and currently ranks as the 15th biggest U.S. ETF issuer. By comparison, rival bank State Street Corp. runs the SPDR ETFs, and is the No. 3 ETF issuer, with $1.06 trillion managed in 137 ETFs. The No. 6 issuer JPMorgan Chase & Co. has $116.42 billion across 58 ETFs.  

Goldman Sachs Files as ETF Demand Rises 

Investors favored ETFs over traditional mutual funds—and passive management over active—in the first half of the year, Cerulli Associates recently reported. 

Investors pulled $178 billion from traditional mutual funds, excluding money market funds, in this year’s first six months. At the same time, more than $200 billion went into exchange-traded funds.  

Goldman’s biggest fund is the Goldman Sachs ActiveBeta U.S. Large Cap Equity ETF (GSLC), which manages $11 billion.  

The new filings come as Goldman Sachs filed for two ETFs in June that mirrored structure of two of JPMorgan’s most popular ETFs, the JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI), which has $28.5 billion under management, and the JPMorgan Nasdaq Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPQ), which has nearly $5 billion in AUM, as the firm attempted to bring in more investor interest to its ETF business.  

The funds, called the Goldman Sachs U.S. Equity Premium Income and the Goldman Sachs U.S. Tech Index Equity Premium Income ETF, will use a derivate strategy called call writing and have yet to launch. 

Contact Lucy Brewster at [email protected]