SEATTLE, Feb. 10, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Acuitas Investments, one of the most experienced teams in providing small and microcap products for institutional investors, is today launching its first Exchange Traded Fund, the Acuitas Small Cap Active ETF (AIMS).
This actively managed ETF seeks to provide investors with long-term capital appreciation by primarily investing in U.S. small cap equities. AIMS will take a multi-manager approach, with the Acuitas team allocating exposures among a carefully chosen and closely monitored group of institutional investment managers.
The multi-manager approach enables Acuitas to provide access to best-in-class small cap strategies. By combining complementary managers, the approach seeks to deliver more consistent performance across market cycles while moderating risk. Investors also benefit from the efficiency of an evergreen, return-seeking small cap product.
“We believe the outlook for small cap stocks has not been this positive in quite some time, as the category has seen rising earnings growth expectations, the potential benefits of lowered interest rates, tailwinds from a deregulatory environment, and a renewed investor focus on the innovations, in tech and elsewhere, being driven by small cap companies,” said Chris Tessin, Founder and Portfolio Manager at Acuitas Investments. “We believe environments like this are precisely where broad, index-driven approaches are going to leave investors wondering how their boat managed to miss this rising tide. Instead, an active approach will be essential to ensuring a portfolio is not just exposed to small caps but exposed to those small caps where true growth is taking place.”
“We’re thrilled to be launching AIMS and bringing just such a product to the broad investor marketplace,” noted Matt Nieman, Partner and Portfolio Manager at Acuitas. “Our approach is designed to source and invest with managers who’ve proven to have differentiated and diligent investment processes with a focus on the long term, while seeking to maintain a below-average volatility profile, no small thing for those investors who may have avoided small caps in the past due to the historical volatility in the category.”
AIMS is benchmarked to the Russell 2000 Index, which measures the performance of U.S. small cap stocks. The ETF is designed to maintain true small cap exposure and may include allocations to microcap companies, while avoiding upward market-capitalization drift.
“Small cap equities represent a segment of the U.S. market where active management can add significant value, yet they remain underutilized by many investors,” added Tessin. “This is a space that has been our sole focus for more than a decade, so we are very excited to bring that experience and our team’s understanding of small and microcaps to the world of ETFs. There is a great deal of education to be done around these types of stocks and we’re eagerly looking forward to more conversations on the role this approach can play in an overall portfolio.”
About Acuitas Investments
Acuitas is an employee owned firm founded in 2011 on the pillars of exceptional research, a focus on investment excellence and great client service. The firm is uniquely focused on small and microcap markets, and is recognized as an industry leader in investment manager research and multi-manager portfolio management. For more information, visit acuitasinvestments.com.
Media contact:
Chase Kosinski/Chris Sullivan
Craft & Capital
chase@craftandcapital.com
Before investing you should carefully consider the Fund’s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information is in the prospectus, a copy of which can be obtained at www.acuitasfunds.com or by calling 800-617-0004. Please read the prospectus carefully before you invest.
There can be no guarantee that any strategy (risk management or otherwise) will be successful. All investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal.
As with all ETFs, shares of the Fund may be bought and sold in the secondary market at market prices. Although it is expected that the market price of shares of the Fund will approximate the Fund’s NAV, there may be times when the market price of share is more than the NAV intraday (premium) or less than the NAV intra-day (discount) due to supply and demand of shares or during periods of market volatility.
Equity Securities Risk: equity securities, which include common stocks, may decline in value because of changes in the price of a particular holding or a broad stock market decline.
Small Capitalization Company Risk: the Fund’s investments in small cap companies may be less liquid and their securities’ prices may fluctuate more than those or larger, more established companies. These factors could adversely affect the Fund’s ability to sell such securities at a desirable time and price.
Multi-Manager Risk: the Adviser, using the recommendations from the model portfolio providers, actively makes investment decisions for the fund through bottom-up stock selection. Accordingly, the Fund will have risk characteristics that differ from its benchmark index.
New Fund Risk: the Fund is a recently organized investment company with no operating history prior to the date of the prospectus. As a result, prospective investors have no track record or history on which to base their investment decision.
AIMS is distributed by Quasar Distributors, LLC
