ProShares, the company known mostly for its leveraged and inverse strategies, cut the expense ratio on its large-cap “130/30” strategy fund “CSM” by more than half, and also changed its name in a bid to draw increased attention to it now that it recently garnered a five-star rating from Morningstar.

The Bethesda, Md.-based firm, which is also carving out a newer niche reputation in other less-traveled pockets of the ETF market such as the area CSM targets, will now charge 0.45 percent a year for the fund, a 52.6 percent drop from the 0.95 percent it charged previously.

ProShares is also changing the name of the fund to the ProShares Large Cap Core Plus ETF (NYSEArca: CSM) from its previous name, the ProShares Credit Suisse 130/30 ETF. The change is meant to better reflect the ETF’s role in the large-cap portion of a portfolio, but won’t affect the fund’s holdings or strategy, ProShares said today in a press release.

So-called 130-30 strategies imply shorting stocks up to 30 percent of the portfolio value and making use of the funds to take a long position in equities that are likely to outperform the market. Indexes similar to the S&P 500 are often used to select stocks for the strategy.

In its press release, ProShares trumpeted the fact that CSM earned a five-star rating from Morningstar in the “U.S. Long/Short Equity ETFs Category Overall” for the three-year period ending Dec. 31, 2012. Such benedictions from the Chicago-based financial information and data provider are often integrated into a given fund company’s marketing plans.

“CSM combines the discipline and transparency of indexing with an opportunity to beat traditional index returns,” Michael Sapir, chairman and chief executive officer of ProShare Advisors LLC, ProShares' investment advisor, said in the press release. “We’re pleased that now CSM will be even more competitive with other large cap options.”

The fund, which was launched in the summer of 2009, now has almost $87.4 million in assets, according to data compiled by IndexUniverse.

The price change and the name change were effective on Thursday, Feb. 7, ProShares said.