The Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF (Ticker: FRDM) recently surged past 100M in assets under management. It is the first emerging markets (EM) equity ETF to use a freedom-weighted approach, seeking to solve the problem of over-concentration to autocracies in commonly used market-capitalization-weighted EM strategies.
“We launched FRDM to see if there would be investor interest in freedom as a new emerging markets (EM) metric,” said Perth Tolle, Founder of Life + Liberty Indexes, the sponsor and index provider of the FRDM ETF. “It’s great to see how investors resonate with it and find it useful as an EM solution with a much freer country set than popular benchmarks. As freedom-levels continue to diverge globally, the freer EMs will be the launchpads for growth in coming decades.”
The FRDM strategy is based on the premise that freer markets perform more sustainably, recover faster from drawdowns, and use their human and economic capital more efficiently, experiencing less capital flight and capital destruction than their less free counterparts.
Ongoing regulatory and geopolitical events in large EMs have exposed Wall Street’s mispricing of autocracy risk. Meanwhile, China’s allocation in market capitalization weighted EM indexes exceeded 40% at its height. “Freedom-weighting mitigates this autocracy concentration risk for investors,” said Tolle.
FRDM is the only emerging markets ETF that has no allocation to China, without being specifically mandated to exclude it. The exclusion is a natural result of freedom-weighting. Currently, FRDM’s highest country allocations are to Taiwan, Chile, Poland, and South Korea.
The Freedom 100 EM ETF (FRDM) and its underlying index (FRDM index) were voted “Best New International/Global Equity ETF” and “Index of the Year” in the 2019 ETF.com awards.
About Life + Liberty Indexes: Life + Liberty Indexes is the index provider and sponsor of the Freedom 100 EM ETF. To learn more about the Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF, please visit freedometfs.com. To learn more about the Freedom 100 Emerging Markets Index, please visit www.lifeandlibertyindexes.com.
