Connect with us

Finance

Goldman Sachs helps its clients launch ETFs

Published

on

Redefining "active" investing... and how it comes to market

Investor demand for exchange-traded funds is not slowing down, and firms without ETF offerings may risk losing business, according to one Goldman Sachs expert. 

Steve Sachs, global chief operating officer of Goldman’s ETF Accelerator, notes that despite the time and resources required to launch an ETF, not offering current and new investment strategies as ETFs may prove even more costly.

“Any number of our clients would tell you, the opportunity cost of not [offering ETF products] is greater,” he recently told CNBC’s “ETF Edge.”

If a firm does not have ETF offerings, Sachs thinks “eventually those assets are going to leave and go to a competitor that does.”

To help clients through the process of launching their own ETF products, Goldman Sachs created its ETF Accelerator, a digital platform that helps clients launch, list and manage their own ETF products. The accelerator launched in 2022 in response to what Sachs described as significant client demand.

“Our core institutional clients were calling and asking, ‘How do we get into this ETF space? How do we deliver our strategy, active and otherwise, in an ETF wrapper?'” he said.

According to Sachs, client inquiries about launching ETFs surged following the passage of SEC Rule 6c-11 in 2019, which intended to help these funds launch more efficiently.  

“While we wouldn’t call that a big boom, it was certainly a catalyst. The idea was it made it easier to launch an ETF, but it didn’t make it easy,” Sachs said. “At one point, we had more than 41 clients that had called us with exactly the same problem: ‘How do I do this, how do I move quickly and can you help us?'”

It can still take years to build the expertise, headcount and risk management framework necessary to launch an ETF, said Sachs. That is where Goldman’s accelerator platform aims to help.

“[It] allows our clients to come in, launch, list and manage their own ETF — but do it off of the technology, infrastructure and risk management expertise that Goldman’s known for and essentially get to market faster and cheaper than they could do it on their own,” Sachs said.

Since its inception, the accelerator has facilitated the launch of five ETFs. The most recent is Eagle Capital Management’s Select Equity ETF (EAGL), which listed last week

Other ETFs launched through the accelerator include GMO’s U.S. Quality ETF (QLTY) and three funds from Brandes Investment Partners: the Brandes Small-Mid Cap Value ETF (BSMC), U.S. Value ETF (BUSA) and International ETF (BINV).

“GMO, Brandes [and] Eagle Capital all felt that the journey to build it on their own would be too expensive and too long,” Sachs said. They didn’t want to miss the opportunity cost of not delivering their investment strategies in the wrapper.”

Disclaimer

Continue Reading

Finance

Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

Published

on

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon

hide content

S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

Continue Reading

Finance

Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

Published

on

A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

Continue Reading

Finance

Stocks making the biggest moves midday: TSLA, DJT, AMZN, RIVN

Published

on

Continue Reading

Trending