Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
Guggenheim Investments is not The Godfather Part III’s Michael Corleone, but the ETF business is all but inescapable for asset managers nowadays. The company was once a major player in US ETFs, but it sold that $37 billion business line to Invesco in 2017. Last week, it filed for the first such products since, including an Ultrashort Bond ETF and five others: Short Duration Income, Investment Grade CLO, Enhanced Equity Income, Core Plus Bond and Securitized Income ETFs, all of which would be actively managed. Similarly, famed bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach’s firm DoubleLine made a rare new product filing, indicating its plans for the forthcoming Ultrashort Income ETF. How refreshingly vanilla.
“Boring is good when it comes to ETFs. This one is actively managed, but ultrashort income is just about as boring as they get,” Todd Sohn, senior ETF and technical strategist at Strategas Securities, said, referring to the DoubleLine fund specifically. But boring doesn’t mean unpopular. “It’s a huge category,” he said. Pimco’s Enhanced Short Maturity Active ETF (MINT), for example, has $15 billion in assets.
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The timing is interesting, Sohn noted. Potential rate cuts by the Fed later this year could mean declining yields, and that could encourage investors to move assets out of money markets, Treasurys and cash, he said. US Ultrashort bond ETFs hit what appears to be a record for inflows last year, pulling in $90 billion, compared with a recent high of $57 billion in 2022, per Morningstar Direct data. That helped raise total assets in the category to $313 billion at the end of last year, up from $223 billion in 2024. Both companies have significant reach in the industry:
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Across eight ETFs, DoubleLine has about $2 billion in assets under management, compared with $51 billion in its mutual funds. Like other mutual fund sponsors, it has been bleeding assets, with nearly $2 billion in net outflows from those products in 2025.
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Guggenheim has about $50 billion in mutual fund assets under management and saw more than $400 million in net inflows last year. The company has eight US fixed income mutual funds, and there isn’t much overlap with its ETF filings.
If It’s Not Fixed, Don’t Break It: Fixed income has been a major area of development for ETF issuers over the past year, particularly in active management. And investors are clearly interested in ultrashort income. “They probably have client demand for it,” Sohn said. “Assuming they have the distribution, that could make for a successful product.”
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