Franklin Templeton announces Putnam's first European active ETF on Xetra

Franklin Templeton announced the launch of the Franklin Putnam Focused US Research UCITS ETF, Putnam Investments' first actively managed ETF in the UK and Europe, according to ETF Express.

The fund was set to list on Deutsche Börse Xetra on 14 October, with the London Stock Exchange and Borsa Italiana following on 15 October.

It is registered for distribution in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland (its domicile), Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The ETF will hold 30 to 45 stocks chosen from the investment team's highest-conviction ideas inside Putnam's broader US Research strategy.

The firm says the strategy outperformed the S&P 500 Index in seven of the last eight years across both growth- and value-driven markets.

Kate Lakin, Matt LaPlant, Jackie Cavanaugh, Robert Gray and Will Rives manage the fund; the five average 22 years in the investment industry, and LaPlant implements a risk-management sleeve intended to limit factor and style tilts.

Matthew Harrison, head of EMEA and Americas excluding the US, said the launch is Franklin Templeton's fourth active US equity ETF and 13th US equity UCITS ETF overall, supported by a global ETF platform he put at $84 billion.

The launch follows the recent debut of the FTGF Putnam Global Research Fund; the firm says the ETF holds the team's highest-conviction US names, while the Global Research Fund pairs the US strategy with non-US research.

Three weeks earlier, as this publication reported on 28 September, Putnam completed a US mutual-fund-to-ETF conversion for the PFRX active equity fund, which kept a 30-to-45-stock portfolio and five managers; that account carried neither the fund's fee nor the size of the converted book.