In early November, Direxion Funds rolled out the first of its much-anticipated triple-exposure exchange—traded funds. Industry watchers have alternately viewed them as dangerous vehicles for speculation or as innovative trading tools for experienced investors, or sometimes, as both.

One of the advantages of an exchange-traded fund over, say, a closed-end fund, is that the ETF rarely trades at a significant discount or premium to its underlying net asset value. Unless, of course, it's a bond ETF in the midst of some of the greatest market turmoil seen in the past 100 years.

A new global NETS ETF launches, along with a CurrencyShares ETF covering the ruble–plus our list of ETFs in registration.

While September was not a happy time for the stock market in general, the true strife was confined mainly to the financial sector. Perhaps ironically, for exchange-traded funds, much of the negative drama was felt by the inverse financial ETFs—the very funds that many investors expected would have their heyday when the Financials sector was tanking.

When the ELEMENTS platform launched its most recent exchange-traded notes based on indexes branded with the name of a famous economist and investor, the obvious first question most people probably had was, "Why didn't anyone think of this before?" Another question—"Can this possibly work?"—no doubt followed quickly on its heels...