.png)
There's a quiet irony in the ETF world right now. While the industry is busy launching 5X leveraged meme coin products and options-overlay strategies on stocks that barely have revenue, a Seattle-based boutique just did something almost radical in its simplicity: it launched an actively managed small cap ETF built on genuine institutional expertise.
The Acuitas Small Cap Active ETF (ticker: AIMS) started trading on Nasdaq on February 10, 2026. And in a market drowning in gimmick launches, this one deserves a closer look.
Who Are Acuitas, and Why Should You Care?
Acuitas Investments was founded in 2011 by Chris Tessin and Dennis Jensen, both former Portfolio Managers at Russell Investments where they collectively managed over $16 billion across U.S. microcap, small, and SMID cap strategies. They didn't leave Russell to build a fintech app or launch a crypto fund. They left to do something decidedly old-fashioned: find great stock pickers in the least efficient corners of the equity market.
The firm runs over $1 billion in assets today across microcap, small cap, and international small cap strategies, all using the same core philosophy: multi-manager portfolios that blend complementary specialist managers to exploit inefficiencies in under-researched small company stocks. Their existing Acuitas US Microcap Fund (AFMCX) has been running since 2014, giving investors exposure to the strategy in mutual fund form. AIMS is effectively the small cap version of that institutional playbook, now wrapped in a tax-efficient, exchange-traded package.
The Multi-Manager Approach: Manager of Managers, Not a Stock Picker
Here's what makes AIMS structurally interesting. Rather than employing a single investment team picking stocks, Acuitas uses what they call “Model Portfolio Providers,” essentially external specialist managers who each run a sleeve of the portfolio.
These Model Portfolio Providers submit their recommended portfolios at regular intervals (typically biweekly). Acuitas then evaluates each portfolio, determines the weighting, and implements changes at the fund level. Think of Acuitas as the conductor of an orchestra: they're not playing every instrument, but they're choosing who plays what and making sure the whole thing doesn't sound like a cat walking across a piano.
The subadviser handling execution is Vident Asset Management, while the investment brains (the manager selection, portfolio construction, and oversight) sit with Acuitas. Portfolio Managers Chris Tessin and Matt Nieman run the show.
This approach solves several chronic problems in small cap investing. First, capacity. Individual small cap managers fill up quickly because the stocks they buy are inherently less liquid. A multi-manager structure provides what Acuitas calls “evergreen capacity,” rotating in new managers with fresh capacity as needed. Second, diversification of alpha sources. By blending value, growth, and core managers, the fund aims to deliver smoother returns than any single stock picker could. Third, manager quality control. If a manager's edge deteriorates (or their AUM grows to the point where they're no longer nimble), Acuitas can swap them out.
Why Now? The Small Cap Moment
The timing is noteworthy. Small caps have endured years of large cap dominance, with the Russell 2000 shedding billions in outflows even as mega-cap tech hoovered up seemingly every dollar of investable capital. IWM, the iconic Russell 2000 ETF, has seen $2.65 billion in net outflows already in 2026, following $4.6 billion in redemptions the previous year. Investors haven't just been ignoring small caps; they've been actively leaving.
But the setup is arguably the most compelling it's been in years. Small cap earnings growth estimates for 2026 sit between 17% and 22%, comfortably ahead of large cap projections. About 25% of Russell 2000 companies were reporting at least two consecutive quarters of accelerating earnings by late 2025, per Goldman Sachs research. Rate cuts have started to ease the debt burden that disproportionately weighs on smaller companies. And M&A activity among Russell 3000 companies is on pace to hit a record set in 1996.
Tessin himself put it directly in a recent ETF Trends interview: “The focus on small caps now is really about higher earnings growth expectations, which weren't the case early last year. It isn't simply about sentiment and people feeling good about small caps. Earnings growth is there.”
He also noted something important about quality: “What we are seeing so far in 2026 isn't a 'junk rally' where low quality names lead, like we saw in late 2025. We are seeing quality rank high and deliver.”
This matters because roughly 40% of the Russell 2000 consists of unprofitable companies. An active, quality-focused approach has a meaningful structural advantage over passive Russell 2000 exposure, and the data backs this up. The S&P 600, which requires profitability for inclusion, has delivered an annualised 1.4% outperformance over the Russell 2000 over time.
The Details That Matter
AIMS charges a 0.75% unified management fee (Acuitas covers all other operating expenses), which is competitive for an actively managed multi-manager small cap ETF. For context, the existing Acuitas Microcap mutual fund charges 1.50% (gross 1.96%), so the ETF wrapper is delivering meaningful cost savings.
The fund benchmarks against the Russell 2000 Index and defines small cap as companies with market caps at or below the largest Russell 2000 constituent ($31.15 billion as of year-end 2025). Importantly, AIMS says it targets the smallest companies where return potential is greatest, differentiating itself from small cap ETFs that let holdings drift into mid-cap territory.
There's no performance track record yet (it literally launched today), which is the obvious caveat. But the team's pedigree and the institutional infrastructure backing the strategy provide more credibility than most day-one launches can claim.
What Makes This Different from the Active Small Cap Crowd?
The active small cap ETF space has been heating up. Avantis (AVUV) has become an $11+ billion juggernaut on the strength of its value-quality approach. T. Rowe Price (TMSL), Fidelity (FESM), Neuberger Berman, and others have all entered the fray. So why does AIMS matter?
The multi-manager structure is genuinely differentiated. Most active small cap ETFs rely on a single investment team or a quantitative process. AIMS is essentially an institutional fund-of-managers strategy democratised into an ETF. It's the kind of approach that pension funds and endowments have used for decades, now available for the price of a brokerage commission.
There's also the capacity management angle. If you've ever been in a small cap fund that got too big and watched performance decay as the manager struggled to deploy capital, AIMS' rotating manager model directly addresses that problem.
The Bottom Line
In a world where ETF launches increasingly feel like financial performance art (2X Short NuScale Power, anyone?), AIMS is refreshingly boring in the best possible way. It's institutional-grade manager selection, delivered through a tax-efficient wrapper, at a reasonable fee, targeting the part of the equity market where active management has the strongest theoretical and empirical case.
Will it work? There's no track record yet, and multi-manager approaches add a layer of complexity that single-manager funds avoid. Manager selection is itself a skill, and not everyone who claims to have it actually does. But Tessin, Jensen, and the Acuitas team have been doing this for over a decade with institutional money, and the leap to the ETF wrapper is a natural evolution.
For investors who believe the small cap earnings story is real and that 2026 might finally be the year active management in small caps gets the recognition it deserves, AIMS is worth watching. Not because it's exciting, but because it's the kind of product the ETF industry actually needs more of.
Sometimes the most interesting launch is the one that doesn't try to be interesting at all.
Comments