By Suzanne McGee

Oct 22 (Reuters) - Reckoner Capital will launch a new exchange-traded fund on Wednesday holding lower credit tiers within the collateralized corporate loan market, in the midst of growing questions about credit quality in the lending market.

The new Reckoner BBB-B CLO ETF will make its debut as some of the largest ETFs in the collateralized loan obligation universe witness their biggest outflows since the spring, according to data from analysts at JPMorgan Chase.

The $25.5 billion Janus Henderson AAA CLO ETF recorded outflows of $476 million for the five days ended on Monday. That represented the lion's share of the $516 million in outflows last week identified in a JPMorgan report published on Monday.

A new wariness has crept into credit markets in the wake of two auto lending-related bankruptcies and bad loans unveiled last week by two separate regional banks, Zions Bancorp ZION.O and Western Alliance WAL.N.

The Janus Henderson ETF recorded its worst day of outflows, totaling $313.8 million, in the immediate aftermath of a very public warning by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon comparing credit problems to cockroaches.

John Kim, CEO and co-founder of Reckoner, an asset management firm specializing in alternative credit, said that investor jitters make this precisely the right time to roll out the new fund.

"We're excited to be launching at a time we think credit spreads could become a bit more rational than they have been recently," Kim told Reuters. "You want to be a buyer when asset prices are cheaper and you get paid for any risk."

The new ETF will be actively managed and each potential addition to the portfolio analyzed, Kim said, adding that "things have been sold in this loan market that we don't love but that flies off the shelf anyway."

Morningstar calculates that the 18 ETFs tracking the CLO market now have a total of $36.7 billion in assets, but only five of those funds have a track record of three years or more.

Monthly inflows into the segment have grown from about $78 million in October 2022 to a high of $4.6 billion in January 2025. Most recently, net inflows for September totaled $1.47 billion.

(Reporting by Suzanne McGee; Editing by Alden Bentley and Jamie Freed)

((Suzanne.McGee@thomsonreuters.com; 917-285-4385;))