With the finish line in sight, it’s fairly safe to say that 2011 will be remembered by most investors as a wild, back-and-forth year that brought plenty of both hope and despair. A hot start raised optimism of a continued recovery after a generally impressive 2011, but the summer months were anything but relaxing; major indexes suffered some of the worst losses since the recent recession.
In examining the year-to-date performances for the 1,000+ ETPs that have been around since the beginning of the year, there are a number of interesting figures that jump out, including both pleasant surprises and bitter disappointments–and some that are just plain confusing [the complete, sortable, document is available in ETF Edge--sign up for a free 7-day trial to get full access]. [click to continue…]
As ETFs have burst on to the scene in recent years and worked their way into the investing mainstream, the number of products available and complexity of exposure offered has increased significantly. Advisors and investors have taken steps to educate themselves on the ins and outs of ETFs, but many are still scrambling to play [...]
The meteoric rise of the ETF industry–and to a smaller extent the introduction of index mutual funds some 20 years earlier–has had the effect of transforming indexes from hypothetical measures of performance into investable assets. As indexing strategies continue to gain more widespread acceptance with all levels of investors, the scrutiny of construction and maintenance [...]
Product development activity in the ETF industry continues behind the scenes at an impressive pace. ALPS Advisors, the firm behind the Equal Sector Weight ETF (EQL), recently filed details on a new exchange-traded product that would be linked to the Alerian MLP Infrastructure Index. That benchmark consists of Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) that earn at [...]
When ETFs began to make their way into the investing mainstream, almost all products were “plain vanilla” funds linked to well known stock benchmarks, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500. But as the popularity of ETFs has surged, so too has the number of product offerings, with approximately 30 issuers now [...]
As the popularity of ETFs has surged in recent years, so too has the number of funds available to investors. With well more than 900 exchange-traded products listed on U.S. exchanges, some have speculated that the ETF industry has “gone into absolute overdrive”, and that the wave of new product launches that continues to wash [...]
In recent years, investors have begun moving away from traditional active management in favor of more cost-efficient indexing strategies. The result has been a tremendous surge in the popularity of ETFs and a serious threat to actively-managed mutual funds that have dominated the investment industry for decades. As market indexes have transitioned from performance benchmarks [...]
In the world of investing, tradition is king, and lengthy histories carry significant weight with an investing public that is surprisingly entrenched in its ways. As creatures of habit, investors are slow to part with familiar strategies and metrics that have lengthy histories. Take the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for example. The “Dow” has several [...]
It’s been an interesting week the world of ETFs: Technology stocks reported strong earnings and oil finished the week at the $80/bbl mark. Here are the ETF Database staff picks of the week’s most important and interesting stories from around the Web:
