Daily ETF Watch: Smart Beta Real Estate Fund

Today Guggenheim rolled out the Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight Real Estate ETF (EWRE), which tracks the brand-new real estate sector that was added to the Global Industry Classification Standard used by S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI.

The equal-weighted index will include all of the real estate management and development companies and all REITs—except for mortgage REITs—that are included in the S&P 500. Real-estate-related equities have traditionally generated above-average income, as Guggenheim notes in its press release; that’s something investors have been seeking out in earnest given the low-rate environment.

The addition means that Guggenheim now has a full suite of equal-weighted ETFs covering 10 sectors of the S&P 500. Like the Select Sector SPDRs, the Guggenheim family does not have a separate ETF for the telecommunications sector.

Like the other funds in Guggenheim’s equal-weighted S&P 500 sector family, EWRE comes with an expense ratio of 0.40 percent.

ETF Securities Shutters AGOL
The ETFS Physical Asian Gold Trust (AGOL | B-100) is suspended from trading as of today. The fund, which held physical gold but vaulted it in Singapore, never gathered comparable assets to its sister fund, the ETFS Physical Swiss Gold Trust (SGOL | A-100), which has roughly $835 million in AUM.

Israel Tech Fund Planned

It looks like another fund will be launched under the FactorShares exemptive relief, the same relief used by the PureFunds family of ETFs. The BlueStar TA-BIGITech Israel Technology ETF will use a broad definition of Israeli while focusing on technology operating companies operating in the areas of information technology, biotechnology, sustainable agriculture and defense, according to the prospectus.

Determining if a company qualifies as Israeli will involve a variety of criteria, including domicile, country of formation or founding, the location of the company’s various operations, tax status, sources of revenue and where employees are located, the prospectus said. The index has minimums for market capitalization and liquidity, but it can select stocks from across the market-capitalization spectrum, including small-caps.

Limits

At scheduled rebalancings, individual components are limited to a 10 percent weighting, and if one stock exceeds 24 percent of the index at any time, it is automatically knocked back down to a weighting of 20 percent. At the end of June, there were 67 securities in the index.

Currently, there are only two funds that target Israel, both of which focus on the broad market rather than an individual sector. The iShares MSCI Israel Capped ETF (EIS | C-52) has nearly $180 million in assets under management, and launched in 2008.

Meanwhile, the Market Vectors Israel ETF (ISRA | C-27) has roughly $73 million in assets and also tracks an index from BlueStar that takes a similarly broad approach to what companies qualify as Israeli. ISRA launched in June 2013.

BlueStar Global Investors, the parent company of BlueStar Indexes, was founded by Steven Schoenfeld, who has held executive positions at Northern Trust and Barclays Global Investors, and was a co-founder of ETF.com’s predecessor.

The filing did not include an expense ratio or ticker.

Contact Heather Bell at [email protected].