A 58-year-old wealth management RIA with about $20 billion in AUM is entering the ETF business.

Zachary A. "Zac" Wydra First Manhattan Co. CEO

Yesterday, Zac Wydra, CEO of First Manhattan Co. [profile], unveiled the New York City-based firm's first ETF, the FMC Excelsior Focus Equity ETF (FMCX on the NYSE Arca). The fund, a series of the Northern Lights Fund Trust IV, now has $77 million in AUM and an expense ratio of 70 basis points.

FMC serves as the investment advisor to the new fund, while Vident Investment Advisory, LLC is its trading subadvisor. Himayani Puri, senior managing director and director of research at FMC, PMs the new fund, which uses a concentrated portfolio equity strategy (focusing in on 25 to 30 stocks at a time). The fund is an actively managed, translucent (more commonly misnamed as semi-transparent or non-transparent) ETF, powered by the ActiveShares methodology licensed from Franklin Templeton's Precidian Investments, LLC.

"Over the past six decades, we have honed a distinctive, fundamentals-based investment approach, and we are compelled to offer this strategy to a broad range of institutional and retail investors in the form of an innovative ETF," Wydra states.

Puri puts the launch in the context of FMC's "business owner's mindset" and focus on shareholder engagement with portfolio companies.

"We will continue to apply our distinctive investment process to identify opportunities in companies that are attractively valued relative to the quality of their business, our view of their earnings trajectory, and our expectation for long-term growth in value-per-share," Puri sates.

The new fund's other service providers include: Cohen & Company, Ltd. as independent accounting firm; State Street Bank and Trust Co. as custodian and transfer agent; Thompson Hine LLP as counsel; Ultimus Fund Solutions, LLC as administrator and fund accountant; and Ultimus' Northern Lights Distributors, LLC as distributor. 

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