The ETF will publish its portfolio at the end of each business day. "What's important about this is with the difficulties with money market (mutual) funds and enhanced cash (mutual) funds, it's (YYY's) going to provide investors with daily transparency. In mutual funds, you can only see holdings at the end of the quarter," Cook said.

A typical retail money market fund or enhanced cash fund's expense ratio is around 0.65% per year, she added. YYY is expected to charge an expense ratio of 0.35%.

Until YYY actually begins trading, PowerShares' active contenders still lurk in the background as the next-most likely to offer the first truly active ETFs.

Of the four funds, Invesco Institutional and AER Advisors will each subadvise two . Invesco will manage the PowerShares Active Low Duration Fund, which will invest in U.S. government and corporate debt with short-term durations; its performance benchmark is the Lehman Brothers 1-3 Year U.S. Treasury Index. It will also manage one of the three equity funds.

Whether they're first by a whisker or not, in some respects, the proposed active PowerShares ETFs will introduce some unique innovations into the marketplace.

For one, they'd be the first active stock ETFs. That's significant since more than 90% of all ETF assets are invested in stock-focused portfolios. That's roughly the same percentage of all open-end stock mutual fund assets invested in actively managed portfolios rather than indexed ones.

But perhaps most innovative is that the PowerShares stock ETFs about to hit the market won't follow indexes. That's similar to Bear Stearns' plans for its active bond ETF, but a departure from the rest of the current stock ETF field.

If nothing else, moving to allow Bear Stearns and PowerShares to come to market signals a key shift by the SEC, which in the past hasn't allowed any potential ETFs to launch without being matched to a specific index.

Other differences of note are surfacing. While the Bear Stearns active bond ETF says it'll report holdings daily, the active PowerShares stock funds won't necessarily have the same latitude.

PowerShares will disclose the contents of the portfolios on their Web site each morning. Most days, the fund manager will not be able to make changes to that portfolio. But on the last business day of each week, the fund manager will be allowed to make up to three trades.

Those trades won't show up in public until the following Monday. PowerShares seems to be taking the tack that since such discrepancies will only take place once a week in a limited number of trades, the fund values shouldn't deviate widely from the published holdings.

Other unique features of the PowerShares active stock portfolios include how they'll handle creations and redemptions. Since they can't reflect the fund holdings exactly, creations and redemptions will be made with a basket of securities that will be similar to-but not identical to-the actual portfolio.

In addition, there will be a small cash component to true-up the value of the creation/redemption basket with the value of the portfolio holdings.

But the broadest active stock mandate will likely go to the PowerShares Active Mega-Cap Portfolio, which will be subadvised by Invesco, parent of PowerShares and the AIM family of mutual funds.

Instead of following a fixed quantitative screen, the prospectus gives the Active Mega-Cap manager wider discretion to implement a portfolio. The fund will be able to trade at any time and on any day, in contrast to the once-per-week trading of the other PowerShares funds.

It can also theoretically trade as much as it wants. Changes in the portfolio will be reflected in the fund's published holdings on the following day, meaning the disclosed holdings may always be one day stale. In comparison, existing ETFs reveal their holdings daily.

This fund will follow the same creation/redemption mechanisms as the funds covered earlier, with representative baskets and a true-up cash component.

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