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Jun

03

ETF Mashups Are the Financial Equivalent of a Cronut

By Tony Seruga

Investors are increasingly turning to ETFs that combine popular strategies

Welcome to the era of ETF mashups, whose issuers act like Dr. Frankenstein and combine popular strategies hoping the result will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Maybe such creativity is expected when there are more than 1,700 ETFs and basically everything under the sun has already been ETF-ized¹. The question is: Do mashups offer an exciting new investing opportunity or just create financial mush? Here is a look at a few of the more promising FrankenETFs:

Last month, PowerShares mashed together two popular strategies—currency hedging and low volatility—with the PowerShares Europe Currency Hedged Low Volatility Portfolio (FXEU). FXEU tracks the 80 least-volatile stocks in the euro zone and uses derivatives to hedge out the currency…

ETF Mashups Are the Financial Equivalent of a Cronut

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