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Northern Trust Global Investments,
the asset management arm of Northern
Trust, has entered the ETF arena
with the launch of its Northern Trust Exchange-Traded Shares, or "NETS." NETS has taken a unique approach to developing its ETF family. Most ETF providers use one family of indexes to cover all global markets; for instance, iShares has a complete family of single-country ETFs that rely on MSCI indexes. In contrast, NETS has licensed the most popular (or some of the most popular) local indexes in each foreign market, such as the FTSE 100 in the U.K., the CAC 40 in France, etc. It's an interesting idea for carving out space in a crowded ETF market. The first NETS funds were launched on April 9 and included the S&P/ASX 200 Index Fund (AMEX: AUS) covering Australia and the NETS FTSE 100 Index Fund (AMEX: LDN) in the U.K. They were followed by seven more funds: NETS DAX Index Fund (AMEX: DAX)—Germany NETS TOPIX Index Fund (NYSE Arca: TYI)—Japan NETS CAC 40 Index Fund (NYSE Arca: FRC)—France NETS Hang Seng Index Fund (NYSE Arca: HKG)—Hong Kong NETS S&P/MIB Index Fund (AMEX: ITL)—Italy NETS FTSE Singapore Straits Times Index Fund (AMEX: SGT)—Singapore NETS FTSE/JSE Top 40 Index Fund (AMEX: JNB)—South Africa JNB charges an expense ratio of 0.65 percent; the rest of the funds charge 0.47 percent. There are several more ETFs covering various foreign markets in registration. |
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