AdvisorShares have announced that the actively-managed Athena High Dividend ETF (NYSE: DIVI) will no longer close and liquidate as previously announced on 13 March 2017.
Noah Hamman, Chief Executive Officer of AdvisorShares.
“While our original intention was to close DIVI, we have elected to keep the ETF open,” said Noah Hamman, Chief Executive Officer of AdvisorShares.
The fund’s last day of trading was due to be 24 March 2017, whereby it would have ceased operations, withdrawn its assets, and distributed the remaining proceeds to shareholders on or after 31 March 2017.
The AdvisorShares board of trustees however approved the rescinding of the liquidation plan, allowing the fund to continue trading on an indefinite basis.
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.
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 approximately $8 million AUM 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.