PowerShares, the Wheaton, Illinois-based ETF issuer known for its QQQ fund and line of products linked to “intelligent” benchmarks, announced late last week that it will shut down several ETFs before the end of the year. December 14 will be the last day of trading for ten PowerShares ETFs: [click to continue…]
The month of September brought an unexpected but very welcome rally in stock markets, as many equity ETFs enjoyed their best month of the year. September also set a number of records from the product development perspective in the ETF industry; more than two dozen new funds from a handful of different issuers hit the [...]
Javelin Exchange Traded Shares, the New Jersey-based issuer that jumped into the ETF game in 2009, ha announced that it will shut down the Dow Jones Islamic Market International Index Fund (JVS). The fund, which began trading in July 2009, had been slow to gather assets and build up trading volume. October 19, 2010 will [...]
Recent years have seen a tremendous expansion of the ETF universe, in terms of both the number of products and total assets. Though the majority of ETF assets are still in domestic equity funds, the bulk of the innovation has taken place in other corners of the market; options for fixed income and commodity exposure [...]
A number of winning streaks came to a halt on Friday, as a generally solid start to earnings season was overshadowed by reports of fraudulent behavior at Goldman Sachs. Financial ETFs plummeted on Friday as anxiety over the regulatory backlash sent the sector sharply lower. Markets will look to another wave or earnings reports next [...]
Javelin Funds, known as a pioneer of Shariah compliant ETF investing, has launched its second fund, the JETS Contrarian Opportunities Index Fund (JCO). The new fund seeks to provide exposure to stocks that appear to be temporarily out of favor but have relatively strong fundamentals (also see Five ETF Ideas For Contrarian Investors).
In recent years, ETFs have been the ultimate growth industry. In 2009 more than 120 new products hit the market, and the first quarter of 2010 saw nearly 60 new launches. While some of these new products are “plain vanilla” funds competing directly with existing ETFs, the bulk of expansion in the space has been [...]
Index Universe is reporting that two new ETFs meeting the requirements of Shari’ah law could be on the way, including the ShariahShares FTSE USA Fund and the ShariahShares FTSE Developed ex-U.S. Fund. The U.S. fund will reportedly invest in nearly 250 mid- and large-cap companies, while the ex-U.S. Fund will invest in stocks in 25 [...]
Dow Jones & Co. has begun searching for potential buyers of its stock-market indexing unit, which includes the widely-reported Dow Jones Industrial Average. The unit of Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal and was purchased by News Corporation in late 2007, creates and licenses indexes for use by ETFs, mutual funds, and other [...]
Among the 30 new exchange-traded products Deutsche Bank plans to launch through its db x-trackers unit in 2009 is a proposed fund that would track the S&P Carbon Efficient Index, a benchmark based on the performance of large-cap U.S. companies with relatively low carbon emissions while seeking to replicate the return of the S&P 500. “This [...]
In April, FaithShares Advisors filed with the SEC to launch a line of ETFs targeted at religions investors. While “socially responsible ETFs” (such as KLD) and clean energy ETFs (such as PBW) are nothing new, FaithShares proposed to narrow the scope of socially responsible investing significantly by offering funds focusing on specific denominations, including:
