VanEck unveils new growth ETF option

Yasmine Raso

Senior Journalist, Financial Newswire

19 August 2025

VanEck has expanded its range of smart beta exchange traded funds (ETFs) available via the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) with the launch of its VanEck MSCI International Growth ETF (GWTH).

Scheduled to begin trading on the ASX on 28 August, the ETF leverages VanEck’s proprietary smart beta strategy – underpinned by a “systematic, rules-based approach that targets outperformance” – and joins the fund manager’s existing international quality, value and small-cap offerings.

GWTH enters the market at a time of growth dominance, outperforming value stocks over the last decade according to VanEck. The fund manager also said the new ETF acts as a ‘democratiser’ and allows investors to capitalise on the strong performance of growth stocks without engaging actively-managed products.

“Investors have traditionally bolstered their risk-adjusted returns with allocations that focus on a specific sector, style, size or thematic,” Arian Neiron, CEO and Managing Director of VanEck Asia Pacific, said.

“This is because the highest-growth stocks tend to be underrepresented in benchmarks. This manifested in the first half of 2025, where the highly visible NVIDIA, Apple and Microsoft mega-caps took a back seat to lesser-known stocks such as defence intelligence company Palantir Technologies (up 492% in the last year) and mobile advertising platform AppLovin (up 417% in the last year).

“GWTH will allow investors to add a dedicated growth exposure to their portfolio, for passive fees. Importantly, the growth factor is a diversifier away from the over-held companies, with NVIDIA being the only ‘Magnificent 7’ company currently included in the portfolio. Minimal overlap between GWTH, the international benchmark, and factor ETFs provides further diversification benefits.

“We undertook a comprehensive research and portfolio engineering process to work through shortcomings in global growth benchmarks. We observed that the traditional index often led to diluted growth exposure and style contamination, making it less effective for those seeking genuine growth factor returns.

“Our objective with GWTH was to develop a smart beta strategy that captured “pure” growth characteristics, and we believe that a disciplined approach to delivering growth exposure can overcome the style drift and capacity challenges often faced by active managers in this segment.”

The launch of GWTH brings the total number of VanEck ETFs available on the ASX to 46.