New iShares ETFs

In December Barclays Global Investors (BGI), the San Francisco-based firm, filed a registration statement for 10 new exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) tracking targeted sectors such as regional banks, aerospace and defense, and home construction. We see a tint of rovalry here: these filing comes after PowerShares Capital Management earlier this year launched several "enhanced index" ETFs investing in some of the same industries as the proposed BGI funds.

The 10 ETFs filed by BGI are:

1. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production,
2. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Oil Equipment & Services,
3. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Pharmaceuticals,
4. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Health Care Providers,
5. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Medical Devices,
6. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Broker-Dealers,
7. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Insurance,
8. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Regional Banks,
9. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Aerospace & Defense
10. iShares Dow Jones U.S. Home Construction.

Some of the planned BGI funds are similar to recently launched PowerShares ETFs like PowerShares Building & Construction (PKB) , PowerShares Aerospace & Defense (PPA) and PowerShares Energy Exploration & Production (PXE). However, the BGI and PowerShares funds have an important difference between them. The Barclays ETFs are designed as 'passive' index funds and follow traditional indexes from Dow Jones & Co. designed to simply reflect market sectors, while the PowerShares funds attempt to add slight outperformance by 'active' overweighting companies with the best "investment merit." It would be interesting to watch over the next few years which approach performs better in this uncertain world of investment.