Welcome to ETF IQ, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the $14 trillion global ETF industry. I'm Bloomberg News reporter and anchor Katie Greifeld.

An exciting new player stepped up to the ETF arena this week: Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates. 

State Street Global Advisors plans to create the SPDR Bridgewater All Weather ETF, according to a Tuesday regulatory filing. The fund will be sub-advised by Bridgewater, which will provide a daily model portfolio specific to this product.

There’s a few layers of intrigue to this:

• Bridgewater wants to launch an ETF
• Bridgewater wants to launch an ETF now, when risk-parity strategies are struggling
• State Street continues to land high-profile partnerships (the most recent being its joint filing with Apollo for a private-credit ETF)

At this stage of the industry’s maturation — the US market commands $10.4 trillion in assets across nearly 4,000 listed funds — one gets the feeling that newcomers are looking to ETFs now because they’re being pushed to do so, rather than embracing the wrapper. The discussions underway at Baron Capital suggest as much.

“Plans to launch now? No. Are we studying it? Yes,” Michael Baron, co-president and portfolio manager, said at last week’s Baron Capital’s annual investment conference in response to an audience question. “The active ETF structure is interesting. There are benefits to an active ETF whether it be liquid, transparent, tax, operational cost.”

Baron Capital hasn’t been immune to the migration toward ETFs, with its assets declining more than 20% from a peak of some $59 billion in late 2021. Still, it isn’t fully sold on launching one of its own — and is still keeping an open mind toward other fund structures as well.

“I think everybody’s crazed about ETFs, but those aren’t necessarily the only instruments,” said Rachel Stern, Baron’s chief operating officer.

It’s abundantly clear that’s where the money is going: the ETF vehicle’s low fees, tax advantages and liquidity have drawn trillions away from mutual funds over the past decade. But a potential reason for reticence: those rock-bottom fees make the economics tough for issuers — hence BlackRock’s push into privates. 

It’s not uncommon for an ETF to hold other ETFs in its portfolio, fund of funds style. It’s not even unusual for a firm to buy its own ETFs. However, it does raise an eyebrow to see that dynamic used as a selling point — and Tidal Investments came out with a unique pitch this week. 

The white-label issuer debuted the FIRE Funds Wealth Builder ETF (ticker FIRS) and the FIRE Funds Income Target ETF (FIRI) — more on the actual strategies in just a minute — this week. The new funds are mainly populated with ETFs from other issuers that launched their funds through Tidal.

“We’re doing this for Tidal clients,” Michael Venuto, Tidal’s co-founder and chief investment officer, told Bloomberg’s Vildana Hajric. “These ETFs primarily will be buying Tidal client ETFs. So if you become a client of Tidal, you have the opportunity to be included in the FIRE ETFs.”

Again, this isn’t particularly spicy. Take Rick Rieder’s actively managed iShares Flexible Income ETF (BINC): the $6.4 billion fund’s second-largest holding is HYG, BlackRock’s passive high-yield bond ETF. But typical reasons for buying your own ETFs could include ease of access to an asset class or better liquidity or something along those lines. Not simply “it’s beneficial to our other clients.”

In any case, there’s no guarantee that these funds will produce massive flows for the other Tidal funds. FIRS and FIRI seek to capitalize on the Financial Independence Retire Early, or FIRE, movement — the basic philosophy is to invest aggressively during your early working years with the goal of retiring while still relatively young. 

As Bloomberg’s Hajric reports, there’s a healthy degree of skepticism from the likes of Morningstar’s Ben Johnson. 

“The connection between these funds’ investment strategies and the FIRE acronym seems to be more a marketing tactic than a fundamental input into their investment processes,” he said.

Fidelity Investments is expanding its reach in the competitive world of systematic strategies for the masses, with the launch of five new active ETFs.

A Palantir Technologies Inc. board member deleted his X account after posting last week that the company’s plan to move its listing to the Nasdaq Global Select Market will force ETF buying and “deliver tendies.”

Nouriel Roubini is seizing on Donald Trump’s inflation-threatening policy agenda to make a case for his new ETF. 

In this week’s Drill Down on Bloomberg Television’s ETF IQ, Paul Baiocchi of SS&C ALPS Advisors stopped by to talk about the Alerian Energy Infrastructure ETF (ENFR). This ETF tracks master limited partnerships and C-Corps in pipeline companies. It’s been a huge year for the fund: ENFR has soared 50% on a total return basis in 2024 (more than double the energy sector itself), with those gains accelerating since Donald Trump’s presidential win. 

With that kind of run, how much squeeze is left in the lemon? Here’s how Baiocchi explains it:

Part of the Trump policy proposal has been to open up more opportunities for production and development of crude oil and natural gas. So in theory, that leads to more volumes, and these companies earn fees based on volumes. It’s not a spread play, the difference between what you produce it at and what you market it at. It really is a very stable business model with some inflation protection.

ENFR has gathered $234 million since its 2013 launch and charges 35 basis points annually.

It's a double-header! Amanda Rebello of DWS, Vanguard's Jeff Johnson and Brian Jacobs of Aptus Capital Advisors will join me, Eric Balchunas and Scarlet Fu on Bloomberg Television's ETF IQ on Monday at noon ET. Then we'll have a special edition of ETF IQ on Wednesday at noon ET with Nouriel Roubini of Roubini Macro Associates, who joins us to talk about his new fund. Watch on Bloomberg Television, on the Bloomberg Terminal at TV <GO> and on YouTube.