ETFs initially became popular with advisors and individual investors as tools for harnessing beta, allowing low cost ownership of broad equity markets through a vehicle that provided transparency, intraday liquidity, and potential tax efficiency to boot. The “first generation” of exchange-traded products were exclusively plain vanilla funds that targeted well known stock and bond benchmarks, such as the S&P 500 or Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index. To the great delight of the pioneers of the ETF space, the last several years have seen ETF asset surge and adoption rates among all degrees of investors rise steadily; assets now top $1 trillion, and ETFs often account for about a third of total trading activity. But to the great dismay of some of those pioneers, recent years have also seen ETFs become increasingly sophisticated and increasingly targeted; many of the new products debuting focus on narrow asset sub-classes of implement advanced screening [...] Click here to read the original article on ETFdb.com. Related Posts: Dividend ETF Investing: Mid Cap Options Four Alpha-Seeking ETFs Crushing SPY Direxion Launches Insider Sentiment ETFs October ETF Roundup: Launches, Filings, and Closures ETF Insider: Markets Regain Footing