AdvisorShares rolls out first active ETF

AdvisorShares Investments LLC launched its first exchange-traded fund today: the actively managed AdvisorShares Dent Tactical ETF. The ETF is actually a portfolio of ETFs subadvised by economic research and forecasting company HS Dent Investment Management LLC, which uses their proprietary demographic research to select what it believes to be the strongest-performing market sectors. “HS Dent represents precisely the type of innovative, independent money manager that AdvisorShares seeks to work with as we provide access to innovative products and strategies that may otherwise be unavailable to financial advisers and their retail-investor clients,” Noah Hamman, chief executive and founder of AdvisorShares, said in a statement. Active managers tend to be leery of telegraphing their moves, because they wish to prevent arbitrageurs from jumping in front of trades and adversely affecting the price of a stock in which they may be interested. AdvisorShares is attempting to circumvent this issue by proposing an actively managed ETF that invests directly in other ETFs rather than individual stocks.