An Empire State arm of a Midwestern bank is entering the ETF business with a pair of launches.

Jason De Sena Trennert Strategas Asset Management, LLC Chairman, Chief Investment Officer

This morning, Jason De Sena Trennert (chairman and chief investment officer of Strategas Asset Management, LLC), Nicholas Bohnsack (president and CEO), and Dan Clifton (portfolio manager) unveil the Strategas Global Policy Opportunities ETF (SAGP on the NYSE Arca, Inc.) and the Strategas Macro Thematic Opportunities ETF (SAMT). The two actively managed, thematic ETFs are scheduled to debut tomorrow with expense ratios of 65 basis points each.

Both new funds are series of the Advisors' Inner Circle Fund III, with Strategas as investment advisor and Vident Investment Advisory, LLC as subadvisor.

Clifton and Strategas analyst Courtney Rosenberger will be the lead PMs for SAGP. Bohnsack and Gerald Hendricks, director and senior portfolio analyst, will co-PM the fund, while Austin Wen, a portfolio manager at Vident, and and Rafael Zayas, senior vice president and head of portfolio management and trading, will also PM the fund. They will use Strategas' "lobbying intensity" framework to power the fund.

"Successful lobbying efforts can drive beneficial policy outcomes, giving certain industries and companies operational and strategic benefits that produce meaningful long-term impacts on equity performance," Bohnsack states.

Bohnsack and Trennert will be the lead PMs for SAMT. Hendricks and Ryan Grabinski, managing director of Strategas, will co-PM the fund, and Wen and Zayas will also PM the fund. They will use a "holistic thematic rotation strategy" to power the fund, investing in three to five themes at a time.

"To this point, there has been a marked lack of approaches that leverage thematic rotation," Trennert states.

Strategas Securities is an institutional B-D that specializes in macro research. It was founded in 2006, bought by Baird [profile] in 2018, and now serves as Baird's market strategy arm. Strategas Asset Management (which had about $760 million in AUMA as of last month) and Strategas Securities are both wholly owned Baird subsidiaries. (Trennert serves as chairman and CEO of Strategas Securities, Bohnsack as president and chief operating officer, Clifton as head of policy research, and Grabinski and Rosenberger as managing directors.)

"We're thrilled to be entering the ETF space with SAMT and SAGP and look forward to telling the stories behind these funds to institutional investors, advisors and more," Trennert states.

The new funds' other service providers include: Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH) as custodian and transfer agent; Ernst & Young LLP as independent accounting firm; Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP as counsel; and SEI Investments Distribution Co. as distributor.

Editor's Note: A prior version of this story gave the wrong date for Baird's acquisition of Strategas. To clarify, the deal closed in 2018. 

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