Trustees of General Electric’s pension invested about $100 million in a new exchange-traded fund that focuses on a market-neutral strategy.
GE’s pension trust invested in the Simplify Market Neutral Equity Long/Short ETF in the third quarter. According to a form filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by the trustees of the pension, the trust ended the period with 4,171,885 shares of the ETF, valued at $103.5 million. It hadn’t owned any at the end of the second quarter, which isn’t surprising since the ETF was only a little more than two weeks old at that point. The trust also owned 1.28 million GE shares as of Sept.
The ETF’s strategy is to “seek profit during both rising and falling equity markets,” according to the fund’s third-quarter fact sheet. The ETF “invests in baskets of global equity securities primarily through total return swaps that provide the returns, long or short, of a basket of common stocks.” Newsletter Sign-up How’s the ETF doing? In the third quarter, it had a cumulative total return of 0.7%, which topped the 3.5% loss of its benchmark, the MSCI World Index, that includes large- and mid-cap companies in 23 developed markets. The ETF also topped the 3.6% drop in the S&P 500 index that quarter.