Avantis Investors, a subsidiary of American Century Investments, has made its debut in Europe with the launch of two systematic global equity ETFs.

Eduardo Repetto, CIO of Avantis Investors.

Following significant success in the US, where their strategies have amassed approximately $54 billion in assets, Avantis’ expansion highlights its contribution to American Century becoming the fourth-largest active ETF issuer.

The firm’s first two listings in Europe include the Avantis Global Equity UCITS ETF (AVWC GY) and the Avantis Global Small Cap Value UCITS ETF (AVWS GY), both of which are now trading on Deutsche Börse Xetra in euros.

AVWC invests across the entire market capitalization spectrum of developed market equities, while AVWS takes a more targeted approach by focusing on small-cap developed market equities that are trading at relatively lower valuations.

The selection and weighting of securities in each portfolio are based on a systematic investment approach that favours firms with relatively smaller market capitalizations, higher profitability ratios, and lower valuations. The approach is designed to maintain broad diversification across countries, industrial sectors, and companies in order to mitigate concentration risk.

Implementation costs are tightly controlled with the funds’ management carefully analyzing whether the forecast benefits of a trade overcome its associated trade costs and risk.

According to Avantis, the approach combines the benefits associated with indexing, including diversification, low turnover, transparency, and tax efficiency, with the potential to add value by making investment decisions using information contained in current prices.

AVWC comes with an expense ratio of 0.22%, while AVWS costs 0.39%.

Eduardo Repetto, CIO of Avantis Investors, commented: “We have been asked for a long time now when we will have offerings available outside the United States, so this is a great day. Many investors have found value in our approach to building portfolios, and we are happy to bring our low-cost, well-diversified strategies to the European marketplace.”

Richard Adams, Head of EMEA for American Century Investments, added: “Avantis Investors offers core building blocks for an investor’s allocation. More and more, the clients and prospects we speak with are interested in Avantis, so we’re thrilled to have these available for clients to access.”