BlackRock announced this week that it will distribute capital gains on just six of its extensive family of iShares-branded exchange-traded funds, adding to the sterling tax performance of ETFs in 2009.

Due to fiscal year offsets, some of the iShares ETFs distributed gains in November and again in December; regardless, the cumulative distributions are listed below.

Of note, all the gains were in fixed-income (and primarily Treasury) ETFs. All of iShares' equity funds escaped unscathed.

Generally, capital gains distributions are an unwelcome event for investors because even if they roll the distribution back into the fund, they still must pay taxes on the gains. Short-term gains are particularly pricey because they are taxed as regular income.

ETFs usually present good tax advantages over other vehicles, but even ETFs can get stuck with capital gains distributions under some circumstances. In 2009, most fund managers have been reporting near-zero capital gains with a few exceptions, such as Direxion and State Street Global Advisors, which have seen gains distributions of as much as 14.7 percent of NAV in the case of Direxion and 3.2 percent of NAV for one SSgA SPDR ETF.

You can read that story here.