Firm’s exemptive filing covers actively and passively managed funds.

Another big name is targeting the ETF industry: Russell Investments has filed for sweeping exemptions with the Securities and Exchange Commission that would allow it to create actively managed as well as index-based ETFs.

The July 2 filing designates Russell Investment Management Company as the adviser to the funds and Russell Financial Services as the distributor. It makes several requests, beyond the basic operation of ETFs, such as allowing funds of funds operated by Russell to buy shares of the ETFs in amounts beyond what is normally allowed under SEC guidelines and allowing ETFs launched by Russell to use the firm’s own indexes.

The filing specifies that the funds could cover domestic stocks, international stocks or fixed income. It also says that the holdings of each fund for the prior day, whether passive or actively managed, will be made available on a daily basis.

Natural gas is trading in contango right now, but a proposed fund could offer a solution.

There’s another commodity fund in the works from the same firm that has brought to market such controversial funds as the U.S. Oil Fund (NYSE Arca: USO), the U.S. Gasoline Fund (NYSE Arca: UGA), the United States Natural Gas Fund (NYSE Arca: UNG) and the U.S. 12-Month Oil Fund (NYSE Arca: USL).

This time around, United States Commodity Funds LLC—formerly Victoria Bay Asset Management—is seeking approval for its second “12-month” commodities fund, except this one will invest in natural gas—or rather, the futures contracts that promise delivery of natural gas to Louisiana’s Henry Hub.

As with USL, the most recent filing indicates that the fund generally will hold a complete basket of the next 12 months’ futures contracts (as opposed to UNG, which simply holds the upcoming month—August 2009

WisdomTree launches new actively managed currency ETF focused on emerging markets.

WisdomTree added another exchange-traded fund Wednesday to its lineup of actively managed currency funds.

The WisdomTree Dreyfus Emerging Currency Fund (NYSE Arca: CEW) made its official debut. The ETF provides exposure to a wide range of emerging market currencies. Those include: the Brazilian real, Chinese yuan, Chilean peso, Indian rupee, Israeli shekel, Mexican peso, Polish zloty, South African rand, South Korean won, Taiwanese dollar and Turkish new lira.

The firm already has eight currency ETFs, all but one of them marketed under the "WisdomTree Dreyfus" brand; this is the first of its funds to include multiple currencies bundled together. It charges an expense ratio of 0.55%.

"CEW should be attractive to investors interested in diversifying outside the U.S. dollar or accessing a less correlated asset class," said Bruce Lavine, WisdomTree's president, in a statement.

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In one of the more shocking developments of a shocking week+,
it looks like Barclays PLC may let the Lehman structured products, including
their Opta ETNs, default.

This is a stunner. 
Our publications go from frankly getting a lot of criticism of “overplaying”
the credit risk issue with ETNs to dutifully reporting on what looks to be the
first ETN default…in the space of, uh, less than a month.  This is a shocking, shocking development and
our forceful reporting of the issue was scorned in some quarters and praised in
others.  And if those things DO default,
how real is that credit risk for you?

The amazing part of this is that it appears that Barclays
PLC, who bought the Lehman Brothers investment banking and capital marketing
business for a SONG (and none of the liabilities), appears willing to let all
of those structured products,

…