Over the past several years, exchange-traded funds have enjoyed a tremendous surge in popularity, passing many major milestones as they were embraced by retail and institutional investors alike. Once comprised solely of “plain vanilla” products tracking well-known equity indexes, the ETF industry has evolved at an incredible pace in recent years, and now offers investors exposure to nearly every corner of the investable market. Along the way, we’ve seen brilliant innovations (such as leveraged ETFs, “intelligent” ETFs, and actively-managed ETFs, just to name a few) and a plethora of new fund launches (at last count, there were 850 ETFs in the ETFdb Database). But it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows along the way. There have been a number of missteps along the way as issuers aggressively launched and promoted funds for which the market had no appetite. [click to continue…]
It’s been a little more than a month since MacroShares jumped back into the ETF game with the introduction of the Major Metro Housing Up (UMM) and Major Metro Housing Down (DMM) exchange-traded products. Shortly before launching the Up/Down housing funds, MacroShares had pulled the plug on similar paired funds offering exposure to crude oil prices – MacroShares $100 Oil Up (UOY) and $100 Oil Down (DOY) – due to the inability to attract a certain level of assets. UOY and DOY were actually the reincarnation of similar products that were initially offered in 2008 but closed down when oil prices skyrocketed, causing assets to shift completely into the up fund. So how are the new MacroShares products faring this time around? [click to continue…]
A week after folding the second incarnation of its unique up/down crude oil funds due to the failure to attract sufficient investments, MacroShares burst back on to the scene with the launch of two new exchange-traded products (they’re not technically ETFs). The MacroShares Major Metro Housing Up (UMM) and Major Metro Housing Down (DMM) began trading [...]
Thursday marked the last day of trading for MacroShares $100 Oil Up (UOY) and $100 Oil Down (DOY), two securities that drew a lot of attention from the ETF community (even though they’re not technically ETFs), but were slow to catch on with investors. The development comes as no surprise, as MacroShares reported back in [...]
The majority of ETFs on the market follow the traditional ETF model – tracking an underlying equity or bond index. But as the benefits of the ETF structure become more widely accepted, inflows from increasingly sophisticated have created a demand for increasingly complex funds. Here are five of the more complex ETFs available to investors today, along [...]
