M.D. Sass Enters ETF Market
Independent asset manager M.D. Sass announced the launch of its first-ever exchange-traded fund. The new product makes the firm's flagship Concentrated Value Strategy available to all investors for the first time.
The new exchange-traded fund, M.D. Sass Concentrated Value (Ticker: SASS), will trade on the New York Stock Exchange and launched with over $70 million in seed capital. The fund mirrors the firm's Concentrated Value strategy, which has been available to institutional clients since its inception on January 1, 2019. The underlying strategy is a high-conviction, opportunistic approach that focuses on a curated portfolio of 20-25 large and mid-cap U.S. equities. The investment philosophy centers on identifying misunderstood or out-of-favor companies where the firm's earnings outlook is significantly above the market consensus. This strategy is managed by Ari Sass, the firm's President. As of the end of December 2025, the top holdings for M.D. Sass's equity strategy included companies such as Henry Schein, Williams Companies, Clean Harbors, and Ametek. The firm's investment process involves intensive, bottom-up fundamental research to validate its theses and quantify the gap between market perception and its own analysis. M.D. Sass's entry into the ETF market comes at a time of significant growth for actively managed funds. This segment of the market has seen a substantial increase in assets and new product launches as more asset managers utilize the ETF structure for their investment strategies. Martin D. Sass, the firm's founder and CEO who established the company in 1972, noted that the ETF structure allows them to offer their deeply researched, high-conviction ideas to a broader investment audience.
