Its not just plain-vanilla equity funds that investors are bailing out of. In the past two months, investors have redeemed 16% of assets from exchange-traded notes, bringing assets under management from a peak of $7.3 billion in June to $3.9 billion today, The Wall Street Journal reports. The rest of the decline is due to falling prices in commodity and currency ETNs.
Besides depreciating prices, investors are beginning to give ETFs a harder, more skeptical look since their values are based on complex derivative strategies.
Besides the fact that commodity and currency prices started declining sharply over the summer, adding to ETNs woes were three ETNs that Lehman Brothers issued earlier this year, which fell to zero value when the firm filed for bankruptcy in September.
After Lehman went under, we just said, were out of here, commented Colorado Springs, Colo., financial adviser Chance Carson, of his appetite for ETNs.
