Extreme Makeover Season
Extreme makeovers historically have been rare in the ETF world, averaging less than one per year. In stark contrast, the past few weeks produced three such events, blowing the doors off of historical trends. It isn’t unusual for an ETF to change its underlying index to a different but related one. …
New Guggenheim Funds Are Not New
Despite what you may have read, Guggenheim did not launch any new ETFs last week. You can safely ignore the headline in the Guggenheim press release. What really happened is buried deep within that press release whose headline is totally wrong: as of June 1, 2011, some already-existing ETFs received…
Guggenheim Rebrands Most of Claymore
As of Monday this week (9/27/10), much of what used to be known as Claymore was renamed Guggenheim. It was nearly a year ago (10/15/09) Guggenheim Partners announced the acquisition of Claymore, with Claymore effectively becoming the retail division of Guggenheim. As part of the ongoing integration…
WMCR: Trying to Cheat Deathwatch
Representatives of most ETF firms don’t like seeing their products on ETF Deathwatch, although some follow the “any publicity is good publicity” theory. Then there is Claymore, a firm that seems to take avoiding ETF Deathwatch to great extremes. Last Friday (8/20), a Claymore press release trumpeted…
Extreme Makeover – ETF Edition
Last Friday (7/24/09), one ETF died and a new ETF was born. However, you won’t see these events in most ETF statistics because it was the same fund. Claymore/Great Companies Large-Cap Growth Index ETF was launched on 4/3/07 under the ticker symbol XGC. The ETF did not perform very well. From…