PowerShares Planning To Close 19 ETFs

by Murray Coleman

Invesco PowerShares is making plans to close 19 of its exchange-traded funds, a dozen of which are based on fundamental indexes created by Rob Arnott's Research Affilliates.
But of those so-called RAFI funds, which use fundamental valuations to weight securities based on FTSE Group indexes, nine are U.S.-focused sector ETFs. The other three are niche-oriented international portfolios.
The moves, which are expected to take effect on May 19, comes after a splattering of smaller fund closings by other ETF providers earlier this year. The PowerShares shutterings picks up the pace of consolidations in an industry that had been growing at a faster pace than traditional mutual funds for a decade.
In fact, last year marked the first time since ETFs entered the investment marketplace in 1993 in which any signficant number of fund closings had taken place.

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