In what was a quiet week for the exchange-traded fund industry, JPMorgan Chase signaled an interesting change to three of its ETFs. The currently actively managed funds will adopt indexes at the beginning of February 2023, among other changes.

The $1.2 billion JPMorgan U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF (JAGG) will change its name to the JPMorgan BetaBuilders U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF, and it will adopt the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index. Its ticker will change to BBAG.

JAGG’s performance has tracked closely with that of the $81.8 billion plain vanilla iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF (AGG) over the last 12 months, and has actually trailed it slightly during that period. JPMorgan is additionally reducing JAGG’s expense ratio from 0.07% to 0.03%, bringing it into alignment with what AGG charges.

The $43.3 million JPMorgan Corporate Bond Research Enhanced ETF (JIGB) will change its name to the JPMorgan BetaBuilders USD Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF and adopt the Bloomberg U.S. Corporate Bond Index. It will also change its ticker to BBCB and lower its expense ratio from 0.14% to 0.09%.

Although JIGB has outperformed the $37.7 billion plain vanilla iShares iBoxx USD Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF (LQD) during the 12-month period, it has seen outflows during that time span, while LQD has pulled in $6.5 billion. LQD has an expense ratio of 0.04%.

The $416.7 million JPMorgan High Yield Research Enhanced ETF (JPHY) will change its name to the JPMorgan BetaBuilders USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF and its index to the ICE BofA U.S. High Yield Total Return Index. It also will switch its ticker to BBHY and reduce its expense ratio from 0.24% to 0.15%.

The $18.1 billion iShares iBoxx USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG), with an expense ratio of 0.48%, is twice as expensive as JPHY’s current management fees and it has underperformed JPHY slightly during the past 12 months. However, HYG has seen $2 billion in inflows during the same time period, while JPHY has lost nearly $975 million.

JPMorgan looks to be tweaking these three fixed income funds to align more with its largest direct competitors, which are all passively managed, multibillion-dollar ETFs.

Launches

It was a fairly normal week for launches, with 10 new funds going live on U.S. exchanges. Among them was the Q3 All-Season Active Rotation ETF (QVOY), which rolled out on Thursday on Cboe Global Markets with an expense ratio of 1.10%.

Newcomer Q3 Asset Management launched an actively managed multi-asset-class ETF that invests primarily in other investment companies such ETFs, mutual funds and closed-end funds. It uses a quantitative approach that selects holdings based mainly on relative strength for four equally weighted sleeves—core equity, active equity, bonds and alternatives—according to the fund’s prospectus.