Last year saw the continuation of the ETF industry’s impressive rise, with more than 100 new products hitting the market and a handful of new issuers entering into the arena. While many of the new exchange-traded products are “plain vanilla” funds that will compete directly with existing products, we also saw a number of truly innovative products that expanded the universe of asset classes available to all classes of investors. The last year has seen the introduction of sector-specific emerging markets and China ETFs, active bond funds from PIMCO, state-specific ETFs, and ETNs linked to the CBOE Volatility Index (better known as the VIX), just to name a few. And for all the talk about saturation in the ETF industry, most of the funds launched last year performed pretty well (see the top ten most successful new ETFs from 2009). [click to continue…]
The ETF industry picked up steam in November, with several highly-anticipated funds coming to market and multiple issuers disclosing new details on innovative products that could be launched in 2010. The biggest news for the month was the entrance of Charles Schwab into the industry with the launch of four ETFs in early November. Debuting [...]
PIMCO, the Newport Beach, California-based bond fund giant, launched its latest exchange-traded fund on Wednesday, the Intermediate Municipal Bond Strategy Fund. The new ETF, which comes with an expense ratio of 35 basis points, will trade under the ticker MUNI, which was somehow still available. The ETF will be managed by John Cummings, the company’s [...]