The folks at a publicly traded firm's 2,500-person, $642-billion-AUM (as of June 30) asset manager are celebrating a pair of big milestones for one of their "strategic beta" (aka "smart beta") stock funds.

On Monday, Marc Zeitoun, head of North America product and business intelligence at Ameriprise's Columbia Threadneedle Investments [profile], and Christopher Lo, head of managed and indexed portfolio solutions, highlighted the recent fifth anniversary of the launch of the Columbia Research Enhanced Core ETF (RECS on the NYSE Arca). The ETF's birthday was late last month, as it debuted on September 25, 2019.

Lo and Zeitoun also note that RECS has reached ten-figure territory: as of September 30, 2024, the fund had $1.06 billion. It comes with an expense ratio of 15 basis points.

Columbia Management Investment Advisers, LLC serves as RECS' investment advisor and index sponsor. The ETF's PM team is led by Lo, with senior portfolio manager Henry Hom and quantitative research chief Jason Wang also serving as PMs. (Wang and Lo have PMed the fund since its birth year of 2019, while Hom joined the fund's PM team last year, i.e. in 2023.) RECS is designed to track the Beta Advantage Research Enhanced U.S. Equity Index.

Zeitoun highlights RECS' "strong returns and positive investor response," noting that the Columbia Threadneedle team has accordingly been "encouraged to further broaden ... research-enhanced offering across other asset classes and to offer the strategy in other wrappers, such as retail SMAs."

"Our goal when we launched RECS was to take a common-sense research approach to US large capitalization core investing and clearly that goal is still resonating today," Zeitoun states.

Lo describes RECS as "a powerful example of the value that Columbia Threadneedle's strong quantitative research and investment expertise can generate for investors."

"RECS seeks to generate alpha through the elimination of names that our quantitative models rate unfavorably — an approach that is often overlooked in favor of overweighting stocks with a positive view," Lo states.

RECS is a series of Columbia ETF Trust I. Its other service providers include: SS&C's Alps Distributors, Inc. as distributor; BNY Mellon Corporation as administrator, custodian, dividend disbursing agent, fund accountant, and transfer agent; FTSE Russell as index calculation agent; PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as independent accounting firm; and Ropes & Gray LLP as counsel. 

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