Nuveen Growth Opportunities ETF’s Process Pillar rating is Average, but a strong management team still helps this strategy retain its Morningstar Medalist Rating of Silver. The portfolio maintains a sizable cost advantage over competitors, priced within the least expensive fee quintile among peers.  

 The management team's considerable industry experience drives a High People Pillar rating for the strategy. The fund's assessment garners an Average Process Pillar rating. The strategy's parent organization earns the firm an Average Parent Pillar rating, and this rating is inherited from vehicles belonging to the same branding entity and is indirectly assigned by an analyst.

Analyst Rating

Microsoft

NVIDIA

Amazon

Alphabet

Apple

Mastercard

Eli Lilly

Broadcom

Costco

Morningstar's evaluation of this security's process aims to determine the likelihood that it will outperform its Morningstar Category benchmark on a risk-adjusted basis over the long term. Nuveen Growth Opportunities ETF earns an Average Process Pillar rating. 

The leading factor in the rating is its parent firm's long-term risk-adjusted performance, as shown by the firm's average 10-year Morningstar Rating of 3.1 stars. The fund's concentrated portfolio, with its top 10 holdings accounting for 63% of assets, supports the process. High-conviction picks court the risk of blowing up, but can also drive outperformance. Lastly, the process is limited by the parent firm's five-year risk-adjusted success ratio of 50%. The measure indicates the percentage of a firm's funds that survived and beat their respective category's median Morningstar Risk-Adjusted Return for the period. The parent's relatively low success ratio suggests that the firm could do better across its fund lineup.

 The investment strategy as stated in the fund's prospectus is as follows:

The investment seeks long-term capital appreciation.  Under normal market conditions, the fund seeks to achieve its investment objective by investing primarily in equity securities of U.S. companies with market capitalizations of at least $1 billion. The fund may also invest up to 20% of its assets in exchange-traded American Depositary Receipts (“ADRs”) and common stocks of non-U.S. issuers, including emerging market issuers, and that are listed and trade on a foreign exchange contemporaneously with fund shares. The fund is non-diversified. 

 In terms of portfolio turnover, looking at year-over-year movements, 31% of the fund's holdings have changed, whether through increasing, decreasing, or changing a position.

Average

Process

Nuveen Growth Opportunities ETF earns a High People Pillar rating. The main contributor to the rating is its parent firm's five-year success ratio of 51%. The measure indicates the percentage of a firm's funds that survived and outperformed their respective category's median return for the period. The portfolio managers' outperformance at the funds they run, as measured by their combined three-year manager excess returns, also strengthens the rating. Low costs, with fees that rank in its category's cheapest quintile, reinforce the rating as well. Fees detract from net returns, so the managers have a lower expense hurdle to overcome.


Karen Hiatt’s veteran status, with 12 years of listed portfolio management experience, brings a wealth of experience to the table. The average Morningstar Rating of the strategies they currently manage is 3.6 stars, demonstrating encouraging risk-adjusted performance. Despite having a small team, the two listed managers boast 11 years of listed portfolio management experience. None of the portfolio managers here invest in this fund. This hurts the rating because manager investment would align their interests with the strategy's investors.

High

People

Nuveen has accomplished years of refinement, but a handful of areas keep it from landing among the industry’s best. It retains an Average Parent rating.
Nuveen is the asset-management arm of TIAA. TIAA purchased Nuveen in October 2014 and in January 2017 announced that Nuveen would become the umbrella brand for all its asset-management capabilities, including the legacy Nuveen and TIAA investment teams and their affiliates. 
Since then, a dramatic transformation has taken place. This includes merging all but one affiliated investment team into centralized equity and fixed-income groups, which are now among the industry’s largest. All operations, technology, and sales functions were centralized and modernized; in 2019, the firm rolled out a comprehensive long-term incentive plan that has helped attract and retain talent, and the previously expansive investment lineup has been mostly cleaned up.
Nuveen’s investment strengths are predominantly in fixed income and real assets. While its municipal team is among the industry’s more ubiquitous, its aggressive approach has been a sticking point for several years. Its experienced equity team hasn’t distinguished its performance from peers’. Finally, CEO Jose Minaya has built a robust management team, but several of them are recent outside hires and so it will take time to see how they integrate with Minaya’s modernized vision for the firm.

Parent

Nuveen Growth Opportunities ETF

NUGO is an actively managed, non-transparent ETF that invests in large-cap US stocks selected for growth, quality, and value factors. The fund utilizes the Natixis/NYSE non-transparent model.

Nuveen Growth Opportunities ETF is an actively managed fund that focuses on U.S. companies with a market capitalization of at least $1 billion. The NUGO ETF's investment approach emphasizes growth, quality, and value, targeting market leaders with compelling earnings potential and well-capitalized companies with favorable return on invested capital. NUGO's sector allocation is heavily concentrated in Information Technology, which may pose a risk in the event of a Tech correction.

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Nuveen Growth Opportunities ETF is an active non-transparent ETF that selects stocks based on growth and valuation characteristics. NUGO has shown volatile performance since its inception, with significant losses in 2022 and strong gains in 2023. There is no evidence that NUGO's proprietary stock selection process leads to sustainable outperformance compared to passive ETFs. Investors should stay on the sidelines for now.

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