ETNs Wane in Popularity

It’s 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.