ProShares Launches Short Treasury ETF
August 20, 2009

SAN DIEGO (ETFguide.com) – ProShare Advisors has just introduced a new exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to move in the opposite direction of long-term U.S. Treasuries.

The ProShares Short 20+ Year Treasury (NYSEArca: TBF) attempts to achieve the inverse (opposite) daily performance of the Barclays Capital 20+ Year U.S. Treasury Bond Index. TBF has an annual expense ratio of 0.95%.

TBF’s underlying index includes all publicly issued, U.S. Treasury securities that have a remaining maturity greater than 20 years. All securities are fixed rate non-convertible, denominated in U.S.dollars and are rated investment grade (at least Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service or BBB- by S&P). To be included, Treasury bonds must have more than $250 million par outstanding. 

Over the past several months, backlash against leveraged and short ETFs has been building.

In early August, a lawsuit seeking class-action status was filed by New York, NY-based Labaton Sucharow alleging  ProShares violated securities law and didn’t properly disclose all the risks associated with its UltraShort Real Estate ETF (NYSEArca: SRS) in its prospectus and registration filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) has issued several warnings about the suitability of ETFs that utilize leverage and attempt inverse market performance. While these products are mainly designed as short-term trading tools, there may be limited cases where longer holding periods are warranted.

ProShares currently manages 90 exchange-traded products with around $26 billion in assets.

New Nordic ETF
Global X Management Company debuted the Global X FTSE Nordic 30 ETF (NYSEArca: GXF). The fund is benchmarked to the performance of the 30 largest and most liquid companies in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

The Nordic ETF will compliment Global X’s Colombia ETF (NYSEArca: GXG) which was introduced in February 2009.
 
Over the past 5-years, the FTSE Nordic 30 Index has outperformed the FTSE Developed Europe Index, which tracks the performance of equities across all of Europe’s developed market.  

“We are pleased that Global X has again selected FTSE as the index provider of choice for tracking international equities markets,” said FTSE’s Jerry Moskowitz. “The FTSE Nordic 30 has been constructed to meet our stringent liquidity standards and employs a unique capping methodology to ensure regulatory compliance in the listing of financial products on US exchanges.  Equities within the index are also free-float weighted to ensure that only the investable opportunity set is included.”

The annual expense ratio for GXF is 0.50%.