Why State Street’s PRIV Quintupled in Assets in a Single Day

Well, that was fast.

After launching to much fanfare, the SPDR SSGA Apollo IG Public & Private Credit ETF (PRIV) amassed about $45 million in assets by mid-December, about nine months into its existence. Then, in just a single day in February, the first private market fund of its kind ballooned to $396 million in assets, roughly five times its previous size. The fund now has nearly 20 times the assets it had in mid-December, which are primarily being driven by the fund’s high performance in its first year of operation, as well as investors’ increasing appetite for private credit ETFs, experts said. 

“Tools that were available at very high net worth [levels], things like private credit … there’s been this kind of democratization of those,” Mike Downing, the co-president of Athene, Apollo’s retirement business, told ETF Upside in January. “So not just the ultra high net worth, but mass affluent investors, as well.”

Boom Docks

PRIV, a partnership between State Street and private markets giant Apollo Global Management, is an actively managed fund providing retail investors with access to private credit in the form of investment-grade debt securities. The fund gathered $745 million in inflows since the start of the year, according to VettaFi, and now sits at nearly $850 million in assets. It has outperformed 88% of its peers in its Morningstar category.

Similar funds haven’t seen as much success:

• The BondBloxx Private Credit CLO ETF (PCMM), which launched in late 2024, is down 0.56% year to date.
• The VanEck Alternative Asset Manager ETF (GPZ), which began trading in June, is down 19%.

A Little Off the Top: PRIV also lowered its expense ratio to 0.55% last month, down from 0.70%. The move makes the strategy less expensive than other major players in the private credit space, like PCMM and the Simplify VettaFi Private Credit Strategy ETF (PCR), which have ratios of 0.68% and 0.76%, respectively.