Guggenheim Grows BulletShares Family

With its possible acquisition by Invesco PowerShares still pending, Guggenheim investments today has rolled out two new additions to its popular BulletShares fixed-income ETF family.

The Guggenheim BulletShares 2027 Corporate Bond ETF (BSCR) and the Guggenheim BulletShares 2025 High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (BSJP) join a lineup that includes 10 other investment-grade corporate bond funds and eight other high-yield corporate bond funds.

The two funds list on the NYSE Arca. BSCR comes with an expense ratio of 0.24%, while BSJP costs 0.42%.

Guggenheim’s investment-grade BulletShares span the years 2017 through 2027 with this latest launch, and has some $5.6 billion in assets under management. The high-yield family covers the individual years 2017 through 2025; it has gathered roughly $3.4 billion in assets.

The family represents roughly a quarter of Guggenheim’s total ETF assets under management, and is no doubt one of the attributes driving PowerShares’ potential acquisition of the firm.

Useful Laddering Strategies

BlackRock’s iShares is the only other firm to offer a full lineup of target-maturity fixed-income ETFs, which are popular with advisors due to their usefulness in laddering strategies, among other purposes.

The iShares family includes 23 funds, with six municipal bond funds covering the years 2018 through 2023, and 20 ETFs offering different angles on the investment-grade corporate bond space from the years 2017 through 2027.

Although its funds are more competitively priced, with expense ratios of just 0.10% on the corporate bond family, iShares’ target-maturity “iBonds” family has just $4.1 billion in assets under management.

Contact Heather Bell at [email protected].