Active ETFs are still banned in Brazil. J.P. Morgan found a way in anyway.
The asset manager is launching Brazilian Depositary Receipts of JEPI, its JPMorgan Equity Premium Income fund — the world’s largest actively managed ETF with $44 billion in assets. The BDR structure lets investors access the fund on the B3 exchange while the securities regulator, CVM, works on a rule change to formally permit active ETFs.
JEPI holds S&P 500 stocks — Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Visa among them — and layers on options contracts to generate monthly income of 7 to 9 percent annually in dollars. Its 2025 volatility was 13.4 percent, roughly half the index. Total returns since its 2020 launch have averaged around 12 percent a year.
Initially available to qualified investors only, with retail access expected by year-end. Latin America CEO Giuliano De Marchi called it a potential watershed. The firm plans to bring its full lineup of over 100 active ETFs to Brazil.
The opportunity is structural. ETFs represent 1 percent of Brazil’s fund market — R$80 billion ($14 billion) — versus 30 percent in the United States. High rates keep capital in fixed income, and the absence of advisor rebates on exchange-traded products limits distribution.
J.P. Morgan is betting that a rate-cutting cycle and election-year volatility will push Brazilian investors toward global diversification. As global ETF head Travis Spence put it: 97 percent of the world’s fund opportunities sit outside Brazil. The gap is the trade.