Controversial dual-class stocks get their own ETF

Companies with multiple classes of shares have stoked outrage among investor advocacy groups in recent years. Now there’s an exchange-traded fund for them.

Exchange Traded Concepts, which is known for its thematic products, is repurposing a fund that currently focuses on forensic accounting and renaming it the North Shore Dual Share Class ETF, according to a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

The fund will track the performance of companies that issue at least two types of shares incorporated in the U.S. — usually one to the investing public and the other to the company’s founders and executives.

Such structures — made popular by the likes of Google parent Alphabet Inc. — have come under fire for their unequal voting rights. Startups in particular have used multiple share classes to go public without ceding their founders’ control. Advocates say the strategy is advantageous to the company’s growth and development.

“There’s a few popular studies on how family-controlled companies tend to outperform non-family-controlled businesses,” said Andy Wester, senior investment analyst at Proficio Capital Partners. “Certainly it’s an interesting exercise in governance monitoring. Typically, those dual-class share companies are called out for governance issues, whether it be one class of nonvoting stock or one class of super-voting stock.”

The new fund, which will trade under the ticker DUAL, is currently known as the FLAG-Forensic Accounting Long-Short ETF (FLAG). In its new iteration, it will track the North Shore Dual Share Class Index, which has returned 38% in the past 12 months.

Index providers are grappling with how to respond to companies with multiple share classes. In 2017, S&P Global Inc. banned dual share companies from joining its indexes, including the S&P 500. FTSE Russell, a unit of London Stock Exchange Group Plc, has said that public shareholders must control at least 5% of a firm’s voting rights for a stock to be eligible for its gauges.

MSCI Inc. considered penalizing these companies, but decided to introduce a new series of benchmarks that specifically include voting rights in their eligibility criteria and construction methodology.

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