Reuters/Shannon Stapleton
People flock over the Brooklyn Bridge during a massive power outage in New York on August 14, 2003.
Goldman Sachs Asset Management is launching an exchange-traded fund, which pretty much anyone can access, that will invest in hedge funds' most popular stock picks.
The fund will track Goldman's Hedge Fund VIP Index, which includes the top 10 long stock positions held by hedge funds. Earlier this year, that group included Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Goldman says that the new fund, GVIP, offers investors a way to invest in the "most important" long stock ideas and "gain exposure to key market themes."
The fund will cost 0.45% of assets managed, according to a press release. That's a far cry from hedge funds traditional two-and-twenty fees - in which fund managers charge investors 2% of assets and 20% of performance gains.
The fund will begin trading on NYSE Arca November 3 with $20 million in assets.
Goldman isn't the first to dip its toes in marketing hedge fund like investment vehicles to Main Street. Wall Street has developed alternative mutual funds, which invest like hedge funds in a mutual fund structure, for instance.
The VIP index had had a rough time of it from August 2015 through June of this year, losing to the S&P 500 by nearly 15 percentage points. It started to pick up in the early part of 2016.
One drawback on the index, as noted previously by Goldman - it is based on public filings, like 13-Fs, that hedge funds make of their long stock positions. Those filings are a snapshot of what that fund held at a certain point in time, and by the time the filing is made (and Goldman has taken it into account for its VIP index) the fund may have changed its position.
Funds also don't have to report international stock holdings, or synthetic short positions in options or futures.