ETF Watch: Direxion Adds Euro Financials ETF

Today Direxion rolled out an ETF on the NYSE Arca offering inverse exposure to the European financial sector. The Direxion Daily European Financials Bear 1X Shares (EUFS) is the inverse companion to the Direxion Daily European Financials Bull 2X Shares (EUFL), which launched in late July.

EUFS is designed to capture -100% of the daily return of the MSCI Europe Financials Index. The fund comes with an expense ratio of 0.47%. 

Newcomer Plans Customer Satisfaction Fund

A firm headed by Phil Bak, a former managing director at the New York Stock Exchange, has filed for its first ETF.

CSat Investment Advisory is planning to launch the American Customer Satisfaction Index ETF (ACSI) on the Bats Global Markets Exchange, which owns ETF.com.

The fund, which will come with an expense ratio of 0.66%, will track the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which was co-developed by a company of the same name and CSat. The index is based on surveys with 70,000 household customers, and tracks changes in customer satisfaction levels. It covers large-cap U.S. companies, and is designed to reflect the sector composition of the U.S. large-cap segment; the prospectus notes that if there are not enough companies with customer satisfaction scores to fill out a sector, U.S. sector ETFs can be used to reach the target sector weighting.

Component stocks must be listed in the U.S. and meet minimum liquidity requirements. Each component is weighted within its sector based on its customer satisfaction score, which is based on questions around customer expectations, perceived quality and perceived value.

Although this is the first ETF to be based specifically on customer satisfaction, there are a handful of ETFs already trading that are based on different sentiment metrics rather than market capitalization or fundamentals or some other more easily quantifiable metric. The largest of these is the $178 million Direxion All Cap Insider Sentiment Shares ETF (KNOW), which launched in late 2011 and is determined by trades made by corporate insiders.

In April, Sprott rolled out the Sprott Buzz Social Media Insights ETF (BUZ), which relies on an algorithm to mine social media for investor insights on different equities. The CrowdInvest Wisdom ETF (WIZE), also launched in April, is based on voting by users of a mobile app. BUZ and WIZE both have $5 million or less in assets.

Contact Heather Bell at [email protected].