Daily ETF Watch: First Trust Revamps Fund

On Friday, First Trust converted its Value Line Equity Allocation Index Fund (FVI) into the First Trust Total US Market AlphaDex ETF (TUSA).

The fund has a new index and a new name, but it still selects its holdings from the total U.S. market, and it still comes with an expense ratio of 70 basis points.

According to a previous prospectus, FVI tracked a modified equal-dollar-weighted index of equities selected for their capital appreciation potential. TUSA tracks a very similar benchmark calculated by Nasdaq OMX that has the same objective.

First Trust has a wide range of funds based on the AlphaDex methodology that includes some 40 funds with a total of more than $17 billion in assets under management. TUSA is the first to cover the broad U.S. market. It makes sense that First Trust would want to refurbish a struggling stand-alone ETF with just $5 million in AUM to fold it into a large and successful fund family.

WisdomTree Closing EU

ETF provider WisdomTree Investments said in a recent SEC filing that it would be shutting down its WisdomTree Euro Debt Fund (EU | D). The actively managed fund can invest in a broad range of euro-denominated debt and had less than $5 million in assets under management at the time of the closure filing.

EU is slated to stop trading on Feb. 11, 2015, with liquidation occurring Feb. 18. It’s the first closure to be initiated in 2015, but in the prior year, there were nearly 90 closures in all.