VTL Offers ETFs Weighted by Revenue

The list of esoteric exchange-traded funds grew by three, with the addition of three ETFs from VTL Associates, The Wall Street Journal reports.

While the funds will track widely used indexes—the Tigers large-cap index, the S&P 400 and the S&P SmallCap 600—the advisor is tweaking its take on them by weighing holdings based on companies’ revenues. Skeptics wonder, however, if these funds will take off in a big way since there already are a number of ETFs based on weighted indexes.

But the argument from ETF providers such as VTL that are tweaking indexes is that back-testing proves that they outperform traditional indexes. Still, that argument is meeting with resistance.

“People are choosing all sorts of individual metrics that money managers use to pick stocks and putting them in an index and launching [a fund] when the back tests look good,” said Don Culloton, an analyst with Morningstar.

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