explains allot17 Jun 2022 18:12
Changes began back in April, when ETF.com reported that GDXJ had gotten too big for MVGDXJ. Essentially, the ETF had become so large that it had “giant stakes in its underlying holdings.” That was a problem for a number of reasons, one of which was that it was struggling to conform with IRS diversification requirements.
To fix that issue and others, VanEck allowed the ETF to take on holdings that were not constituents of MVGDXJ. Then, the firm announced that after June 16, “companies ranking between 60 percent and 98 percent (currently between 80 percent and 98 percent) of the full market capitalization [of the investable gold miner universe would] qualify for inclusion in the MVIS Global Junior Gold Miners Index.”
As The Globe and Mail recently explained, in layman’s terms that means after that point GDXJ will be able to buy gold stocks whose market caps range from $75 million to $2.9 billion; that’s up from the previous range of $75 million to $1.6 billion.
The catch is that to free up cash, the ETF will have to sell more than 50 percent of its shares in the smaller gold companies it currently holds. Unsurprisingly, that news has led to instability in the market — GDXJ shares took a steep fall after the rebalancing was announced, and since then companies held by the ETF have faced volatility