Van Eck announced this week that it has reduced the expense caps for five of its exchange-traded funds, effective May first. The move represents the latest development in a string of fee reductions by ETF issuers, reflecting both increasing asset bases and economies of scale as well as efforts to lure cost-conscious investors. The ETFs affected by the latest round of fee cuts include the ultra-popular GDXJ, which currently has close to $2.5 billion in assets [see all the Gold Miner ETFs here].
The ETFs impacted by the price cuts, along with the annual savings generated based on assets at the end of April, include:
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It doesn’t seem like that long ago that exchange-traded commodity products were the darlings of the ETF world. Praised for democratizing an entire asset class (and one capable of delivering non-correlated returns to investors at that), commodity ETFs saw billions of dollars of cash inflows in 2009. Investors rushed to get their hands on everything [...]
Global X, the New York-based ETF issuer that already offers sector-specific China and Brazil funds and a number of ETFs focused on commodity-intensive equities, continued to expand its pipeline; the firm recently made an SEC filing laying the groundwork for an oil equities ETF. Although details from the filing were scarce, there were a few [...]
With the finish line in sight, 2010 has been a generally solid year for commodities as an asset class; strong demand from emerging markets, a shaky dollar, fears about inflation, and a number of supply issues have conspired to send prices of everything from corn to gold to sugar skyward [see Top Five Commodity ETFs [...]
It’s baaaaaaaack. After a brief hiatus that saw investors rushing to determine the best ways to battle deflation, inflationary concerns have begun to surface again. The cause of the latest bout of inflationary anxiety is of course the QE2 program recently announced by the Federal Reserve that calls for the purchase of hundreds of billions [...]
As world population levels have surged along with developing economies, an increased focus as been put on natural resource development and production in order to increase the average standard of living for the world’s nearly 7 billion people. This rapid increase–along with a variety of natural disasters, such as the devastating wheat crisis in Russia [...]
Direxion, one of the leaders in the rapidly-expanding leveraged ETF space, has filed for approval on 36 new ETFs, including two non-leveraged products. The Direxion Auto Shares would seek to match the performance of the Indus Global Auto & Auto Suppliers Index, a benchmark that consists of approximately 30 companies engaged in the manufacturing, maintenance, [...]
Although news of SEC charges against Goldman Sachs became the dominant story on Wall Street on Friday, the focus on investors for much of the past week was on the handful of companies that kicked off another critical earnings season. With the market recovering much of the ground lost during the recent recession, many investors [...]
It’s difficult to put a finger on the exact cause of the recent surge in popularity of commodity investing. More than likely, the boom is attributable to a number of different factors. Correlation between international equity markets (and even between stocks and bonds) has surged in recent years, increasing both the importance and difficulty of [...]
With the tremendous rise of ETF investing has come the “democratization” of many asset classes previously out-of-reach to all but the biggest and richest individuals and institutions. One of the primary areas of growth in the ETF industry has been commodity products, which have continued to multiply and attract billions of dollars in assets. According [...]
Over the last year, U.S. equity markets have staged a remarkable recovery as volatility has plummeted and the emergency stimulus measures implemented amidst heated debate appear to have had their intended effect. Indications that unemployment may be close to peaking and that consumer confidence is on the rise once again only add fuel to the [...]
