ETFs

Here’s an interactive slide show detailing five important facts every financial advisor needs to know about actively managed ETFs.

Here’s an interactive slide show highlighting five facts advisors and investors need to know about actively managed ETFs.

Exchange-traded funds are all the craze and new ones are coming out of the woodwork daily. But do investors really know what they’re buying in a hedge replication strategy or an Eastern European index fund?

Alternative investment manager Direxion has launched an exchange-traded fund that provides investors with equal weighted exposure to the constituents of the NASDAQ-100 index.

Market Vectors, the exchange-traded product arm of Van Eck Global, is tapping into the resilience of Indonesia’s economy by launching a fund focusing on the country’s small cap equity sector.

A former Morgan Keegan registered rep agreed to be barred permanently from the industry for putting 10 of his middle-class clients into “unsuitable” investments –- highly leveraged ETFs, regulators said.

The liquidity of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, as well as their operating costs, could be collateral damage, depending on how the Volcker Rule precluding proprietary trading by banks gets implemented, Investment Company Institute general counsel Karrie McMillan will argue Monday at the 2012 ICI Mutual Funds and Investment Management Conference in Phoenix.

State Street Global Advisors began trading the SPDR Barclays Capital Short Term High Yield Bond ETF on the NYSE Arca. The new SPDR ETF offers investors access to high yield corporate bonds with short durations. Its annual expense ratio is 40 basis points.

PIMCO's Bill Gross decided to take the active management he used to make the firm's Total Return Fund the largest mutual fund extant and apply it, with some variation, to bonds that could be traded at any time in an exchange-traded fund.

Van Eck Global is stirring up another exchange-traded fund in the form of the Market Vectors Global Chemicals ET, which will bet on U.S. and non-U.S. chemical concerns.

BlackRock is looking to do some good while doing well at the same time with its latest values-based exchange-traded fund focusing on human rights.

Van Eck Global has filed for permission from the SEC to create exchange-traded fund share classes of at least one of its five mutual funds.

The Vanguard Group, Inc. has doubled its sales force, to 220 staffers, serving financial advisors in an initiative to promote its exchange traded-fund products.

ETFs have seen rapid adoption by investors and advisors in recent years, but while the products themselves are known for their liquidity and transparency, what’s less understood is the tax bite some may deliver at the end of each year. With this in mind, Financial Planning spoke with Adam Patti, CEO of IndexIQ, to talk taxes and ETFs.

Charles Schwab Investment Management, Inc. has filed paperwork with the SEC to launch active exchange-traded funds, which are getting a lot of buzz courtesy of PIMCO’s latest offering and iShares’ proposed fund.

On the heels of Bill Gross’ latest active exchange-traded fund, BlackRock has thrown its hat into the active ETF space with a proposed offering of its own.

Thanks to stagnant interest rates and lingering worries over the Eurozone and other developed markets, the exchange traded fund market in February grew 3.9%, or more than $44 billion assets, over the previous month, according to a snapshot report released by State Street Global Advisors.

The exchange-traded product market reached $1.72 trillion of assets at the end of February, up 12.8 percent year to date, according to the ETF Landscape report issued by the BlackRock Investment Institute.

Exchange-traded fund sponsor WisdomTree has launched a corporate bond ETF covering emerging market issuers across Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The shares finished trading on their first day worth $99.96. Altogether, 550,375 shares changed hands on the NYSE Arca electronic exchange.