With 2011 just around the corner, the curtain is closing on yet another year of tremendous expansion in the ETF industry. With inflows for the year at close to $100 billion, total ETF assets will recently eclipsed the $1 trillion mark for the first time. From a product development standpoint, 2010 was a record year; more than 200 new ETFs hit the market, and the pipeline has continued to fill with new ideas. Some of the exchange-traded products debuting in 2010 are direct competitors to existing funds; Vanguard, for example, launched a suite of ETFs linked to popular S&P and Russell benchmarks that undercut similar products from competing issuers on a cost perspective. But for the most part innovation continued to be the name of the game in the ETF industry in 2010, as the majority of new launches were first-to-market products that opened up new asset classes and investment [...] Click here to read the original article on ETFdb.com.