Since first jumping into the exchange-traded funds market two-plus years ago with 20 dividend-weighted portfolios, WisdomTree Investments has firmly been cast as a value-styled management shop.

That focus on weighting index-based ETF portfolios on business fundamentals—rather than traditional  market-cap size figures—hasn't changed. But the New York-based firm launched Thursday an ETF focused squarely on large-cap growth stocks.  

By itself, that wouldn't seem to be a major introduction. Diversified large-cap growth funds, after all, aren't exactly out of the ordinary. But two items stand to separate the WisdomTree LargeCap Growth ETF (NYSEArca: ROI) from the pack.

For one, the new fund focuses on corporate earnings, otherwise known as net income or profit, to weight stocks in its portfolio. That's different from rivals such as the $9.2 billion iShares Russell 1000 Growth Index (NYSEArca: IWF) and the $4.6 billion iShares S&P 500 Growth Index (NYSEArca: IVW). Both use straight market capitalization sizes to determine portfolio weights.

"The only pure competitors for ROI on the large growth side are traditional market-cap-sized indexes," said Luciano Siracusano, WisdomTree's chief investment strategist.

The lowest-priced large-cap growth ETF on the market is the Vanguard Growth ETF (NYSEArca: VUG). It has an expense ratio of 0.10% and tracks the MSCI U.S. Prime Market Growth Index. WisdomTree's ROI is expected to be 0.38% per year.

That leads to the second big point of departure for the new ETF. As an early advocate of using fundamental data rather than market-cap size metrics to weight portfolios, WisdomTree is a pioneering nontraditional ETF provider. Besides dividend streams, its portfolios are branching into another key measure to value businesses -- net earnings.

Assessing The Field

WisdomTree isn't alone in offering nontraditional index-based ETFs. PowerShares has a series of funds based on the FTSE RAFI indexes created by Research Affiliates and FTSE. Those use a broad set of fundamental valuations to design portfolios. The closest in terms of style to ROI is probably the PowerShares FTSE RAFI US 1000 Portfolio (NYSEArca: PRF). But that's categorized as a large-cap value fund by Morningstar.

Another nontraditional ETF provider using different fundamental valuations is RevenueShares. Its closest rival to ROI would be the RevenueShares Large Cap ETF (NYSE: RWL).  It takes the blue-chip universe and weights those names by annual sales. And again, Morningstar categorizes RWL as a large value fund.

The closest competitor is probably SPA ETF's MarketGrader Large Cap ETF (NYSEArca: SZG), which uses a quantitative strategy to select 100 large-cap stocks. It is classified as a large-cap growth fund by Morningstar, although it is not explicitly screened to capture growth stocks alone.

ROI is the only non-traditional ETF with an explicit growth focus.

ROI's index starts with around 300 stocks based on four growth factors: earnings-per-share growth; sales-per-share growth; book-value-per-share growth and stock-price-per-share growth.

By contrast, the Russell 1000 Growth Index uses a combination of price-to-book values and projected earnings estimates. Other benchmarks throw in a few other factors to create a different valuation mix.

"All of the pure growth indexes use multiple factors to select components," said Siracusano. "But they determine weightings in the same way -- by market capitalization sizes."

Even though the benchmark underlying WisdomTree's new fund uses a different methodology to rank stocks, ROI's list of constituents looks much the same as its market cap weighted rivals. For example, some 17 of the top 20 companies listed in the WisdomTree LargeCap Growth Index at the time of its last rebalancing were also in the Russell 1000 Growth Index or the S&P 500 Growth Index.

"But since we weight our index by [net] earnings, the characteristics are different from the other growth indexes," said Siracusano.

Backtested data from WisdomTree shows its index has a lower price-earnings ratio. Here's how it shaped up heading into November:

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