PowerShares boosts its leadership in active bond ETFs with two more to go with last April’s entry.

PowerShares says it has filed to launch a pair of new actively managed exchange-traded funds focusing on non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities.

The two proposed funds are the Prime Non-Agency RMBS Opportunity Fund and the Alt-A Non-Agency RMBS Opportunity Fund.

The types of fixed-income both funds will hold come from non-subprime
areas of the RMBS market. Credit requirements for prime loans are the
most difficult to qualify for and Alt-A somewhat less.  

“We are hopeful that these ETFs will provide
access and transparency into these markets along with some of the much
needed additional liquidity originally intended by the TARP,” added Bond.  

Money managers have shown a lot of interest in buying investments they believe can take advantage of TARP and other government rescue programs. In fact, earlier this month an index came out of TARP companies directly involved in government bailouts. (See story here.)

The funds’ holdings will be updated daily and run by parent Invesco’s institutional money managers, according to PowerShares. No word yet on how much PowerShares will charge for the new bond funds. Its first actively managed bond ETF, the Active Low Duration Fund (NYSE: PLK) charges an expense ratio of 0.29%.  

But PLK has only attracted some $3.8 milllion in assets since launching in April 2008. It was actually the second active bone ETF on the market. Since the fall of Bear Stearns and its active bond fund, PLK has been the only player in that category of the active ETF market. (See related story here.)

But it’s a short-duration fund and there are lots of currency ETFs out now, some of which are run through active managers. Since the proposed PowerShares RMBS funds will hold longer-termed issues, these will represent a broadening along yield curves in actively managed bond ETFs available to investors. 

It might be worth noting that markets have been warming to mortgage-backed securities as a whole for awhile now.

As related by Dow Jones Newswires’ Ian Salisbury, who broke the story in the Wall Street Journal, several of the most popular mutual fund managers have already boosted their more diversified portfolios significantly in the RMBS market. (See third item in “Best ETF Stores In The National Media” here.)

And many broad index-based bond ETFs have already done much the same, following an ongoing and evolving market trend. 

As debated on these pages and others many times in the past, if nothing else the entry of two more actively managed bond ETFs from PowerShares raises a primary question investors must answer: Will active managers find more luck beating passively run portfolios in the ETF marketplace? (See related Journal of Indexes story, “Will Actively Managed Bonds Work?” here.)

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