February 27, 2008 at 1:00 am by Tom Lydon
A trio of new exchange traded funds (ETFs) launched on Friday, taking a different twist on the Standard & Poor’s benchmarks.
They will use the same stocks as the S&P but the ETF will weight names by revenue rather than market-cap sizes, reports Murray Coleman for Index Universe. Sean O’Hara, president of RevenueShares Investor Services, says that weighting by revenue was the most efficient way to keep the S&P benchmarks’ lineup the same while providing different patterns of return.
Some analysts don’t like the price so far: 0.49% in annual fees. O’Hara says that the returns based on back-tested data still would have been better than the S&P 500’s average annualized 11.4% between 1991-2007.
The new underlying indexes were created so investors wouldn’t fall prey to security selection bias. The new ETFs are:
- RevenueShares Large-Cap Fund (RWL): Aims to take the best of the S&P 500
- RevenueShares Mid-Cap Fund (RWK): Designed to complement the S&P 400
- RevenueShares Small-Cap Fund (RWJ): Replicates S&P 600
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