In November, we covered the first European active ETF launches by Dimensional Fund Advisors (click here to read more), a significant player in the US market. These funds have achieved rapid success in terms of gathering assets, currently standing at $994m in the case of the Global Core Equity UCITS ETF and $150m for the Global Targeted Value UCITS ETF. Buoyed by this success, Dimensional has added another two funds to its offering: the US Core Equity Market UCITS ETF and the Global ex-US Core Market UCITS ETF.
Founded in 1981, Dimensional was built around the idea of applying financial research to portfolio construction, and its academic links remain unusually strong: Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, both renowned finance academics, advise the business, while Dimensional presents itself as a manager that translates evidence on size, value and profitability into investable portfolios. That heritage has helped it build formidable scale. As of 31 December 2025, Dimensional had $944bn of firmwide assets under management, 15 offices globally and more than 1,600 employees.
What has made the group stand out in the ETF space is the speed with which it has transported that philosophy into the wrapper. Dimensional launched its first US ETFs only in November 2020, yet by September 2025 it already had 41 ETFs with more than $225bn in assets. That rapid build-out matters in a European context because these new ETFs are effectively UCITS versions of strategies Dimensional has already scaled elsewhere.
Dimensional’s own description is that its ETFs keep the broad diversification and low-turnover discipline investors associate with passive investing, while allowing flexible portfolio management and trading on a daily basis. That approach is visible in the new funds. The US Core Equity Market UCITS ETF and Global ex-US Core Equity Market UCITS ETF listed on the London Stock Exchange on 20 March and also trade on Xetra. Both seek broad market exposure with tilts towards smaller, cheaper and more profitable companies. The manager also says it can delay purchases or sales until momentum has decayed.
Fees look carefully designed to suit the audience Dimensional is targeting. At 0.15% for the US Core strategy and 0.20% for the Global ex-US strategy, the new launches come in below the 0.26% charged on the Global Core Equity UCITS ETF and well below the 0.44% charged on the Global Targeted Value UCITS ETF. They also compare favourably with the broader European active ETF market, where Morningstar says the average fee for equity active ETFs stood at 0.37% in late 2025. This is important because much of the European active ETF market has so far been dominated by “index-plus” products – low-tracking-error, benchmark-aware funds designed as core building blocks. Dimensional’s new launches are clearly trying to sit in that area of the market, but with a more explicit multifactor identity.
Our view
David Batchelor, senior analyst at QuotedData, said: “One of the main debates about the future of the European ETF market is the split in its growth between homegrown firms and companies that have had success in the US using that experience to establish themselves across the pond. The success of Dimensional is a striking example of the latter. It is a giant stateside, with over $200bn in ETFs, and has proven adept at leveraging existing strategies, particularly the Global Core Equity fund, into a sizable European fund in a short space of time. It is therefore not surprising to see Dimensional quickly following up with two further launches; the US core fund seems particularly logical. The funds’ OCFs are also noticeably low, at 0.15% for the US Core fund and 0.2% for the Global ex-US fund.
One note of caution is the likelihood of some of the growth since launch being down to cannibalisation of existing Dimensional assets, as opposed to genuinely new money. For the Global Core Equity fund this would primarily be from the mutual fund version of the same strategy, which has £6.5bn of assets. It is not possible to ascertain the extent of this, but a certain amount seems inevitable”.
This is all interesting, but the analysis that is most relevant to readers is not so much Dimensional’s success in raising funds, but the investing success of its strategies. Are they outperforming their relative indices and how much risk are they taking to achieve that?
Yes indeed, performance data will be all-important here, and we will keep a close eye and report as appropriate. As of now, the company has not published any performance data for the funds in the active ETF wrapper, the oldest of which was only launched 3 months ago.