Van Eck Global and commodities guru Jim Rogers have teamed up to launch a new broad-based commodity equities exchange-traded fund, the Market Vectors - RVE Hard Assets Producers ETF (AMEX: HAP), which could significantly reshape the natural resource investing landscape. The fund launched on September 3 and is being billed as the first global, pure-play, hard assets ETF. Hard assets refers to any company producing "stuff," such as oil drillers, gold miners, copper companies, alternative energy plays and more.

HAP is being positioned as a direct alternative to the iShares S&P North American Natural Resources Sector Index ETF (NYSEArca: IGE), the dominant natural resources ETF on the market today. Van Eck also sees it as a timely alternative to the commodity futures ETFs that have become so popular over the past year.

Commodity Futures Vs. Commodity Equities

The traditional means of investing in the commodities market is to buy commodity futures or a commodity futures-based fund. That gives you pure-play exposure to commodities and has become an extremely popular strategy in the ETF space, with funds like the PowerShares DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund (AMEX: DBC) attracting significant assets. Van Eck said there is more than $30 billion invested in funds linked to futures-based commodity indexes.

But commodity futures aren't the only way to tap into the commodity space; you can also buy shares of commodity-producing stocks. Commodity stocks track closer to traditional equities than commodity futures, but come with the additional risk and benefits of owning equities—i.e., companies can either make good or bad corporate decisions, either adding or subtracting value long term.

Van Eck thinks that its Hard Assets Producers Fund represents an important new step for commodity-focused ETFs.

"If we are five years into commodities being taken seriously as an asset class, and there have already been three versions of the futures-based commodity indexes, this is commodity index version 4.0," said Jan van Eck, principal at Van Eck Global.

Of course, the idea of investing in commodity stocks is not new. Van Eck says there are $16 billion invested in index funds linked to commodity stocks, including $1.9 billion in IGE.

But the company says IGE and other commodity equity funds have two major flaws: They focus solely on North American companies, and they dramatically overweight the Energy space. 

The Van Eck Hard Assets Producers Fund covers 321 companies in 40 countries and across six sectors. Forty-four percent of the fund is invested in stocks outside of the U.S. and Canada, and 60% is invested in non-energy companies. That compares to an 80% Energy weight in IGE, which is 100% allocated to North America.

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