AdvisorShares, a sponsor of actively managed exchange-traded funds, has announced that the AdvisorShares Athena High Dividend ETF (NYSE Arca: DIVI) will close. The AdvisorShares Board of Trustees approved the closing and subsequent liquidation of DIVI. The fund’s last day of trading will be 24 March 2017, which will also be the final day for creations or redemptions by authorised participants. The fund will cease operations, withdraw its assets, and distribute the remaining proceeds to shareholders on or after 31 March 2017.
DIVI aims to deliver long-term capital appreciation from holding global equities by using a behavioural finance approach to identifying securities for inclusion in the portfolio. 22,000 funds are assessed each month for strategy, consistency and conviction, and the stocks with the highest relative weight across these funds are identified and selected for inclusion in DIVI. A high dividend screen is then used and the final portfolio is dividend yield-weighted. Sector, strategy and country diversification are used to reduce risk. The ETF has $8 million AUM as of 14 March and a net expense ratio of 0.99%.
The ETF returned 29% in the year to the end of February 2017 but is down 8% overall since its inception in July 2014.
After the closure, AdvisorShares will still offer 21 actively managed ETFs with $1.1 billion in collective AUM.
The first actively managed ETF appeared in 2008 and there are now around 170 available across all asset classes, although they have largely failed to gain traction. Of the top 10 actively managed ETFs by AUM, nine are fixed income funds.
European investors looking for a similar ETF could try the ComStage Alpha Dividende Plus UCITS ETF (Xetra: F750), an actively managed ETF primarily investing in European and US equities with high dividend yields.