Dimensional Fund Advisors, the quant house that has long insisted it is “active but systematic,” is crossing the Atlantic. The $853bn asset manager, known for its data-driven take on market efficiency, is launching its first exchange traded funds in the UK and Europe.
Two UCITS products — Global Core Equity and Global Targeted Value — have now been registered across several European jurisdictions, including the UK, Germany and the Nordics. Listings in London and Frankfurt are due by the end of 2025. Both funds will mirror Dimensional’s existing mutual fund strategies: diversified portfolios aimed at capturing size and value premiums in developed markets.
For Dimensional, the move is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In the US, it has built a $200bn active ETF franchise — the largest of its kind — by repackaging its long-running mutual fund strategies into tax-efficient, low-cost wrappers. The European debut extends that playbook. Fees will match those of the existing funds: 0.26 per cent and 0.44 per cent respectively.
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- Pictet brings trio of active ETFs to the US market
- WisdomTree passes $50bn in European ETF assets as inflows surge
Active ETFs remain a niche in Europe’s UCITS market, which is still dominated by traditional passive index trackers. Dimensional’s pitch — “go beyond indexing” — seeks to occupy a middle ground between academic purity and investor practicality: systematic portfolios that don’t hug benchmarks but also don’t rely on stock-picking flair.
As Lukas Schneider, the firm’s Berlin branch manager, puts it, investors “first choose Dimensional, then choose how to access the strategy.” The hope is that the ETF wrapper will broaden access via platforms and fintechs that increasingly favour exchange-traded formats.
Dimensional’s intellectual roots run deep — its founders drew on the work of Nobel laureates Eugene Fama and Kenneth French — but its marketing remains refreshingly pragmatic. As Co-CEO Nathan Lacaze notes, “markets do a good job at setting prices,” but every basis point still counts.
Dimensional’s European ETFs are unlikely to move markets, but they do sharpen the continent’s slow shift towards active quant ETFs. For a firm that has long claimed to blend academic rigour with commercial scale, this is simply the next logical experiment in financial science.
