Finally, An ETF Trade Association

There are nearly 8,000 trade associations in the U.S. encompassing major industries ranging from oil to telecom to technology. There's even a trade association for convenience stores and one for America's adult nightclubs. Now, the almost $1.2 trillion U.S. exchange-traded products industry has its own trade group, the National Exchange Traded Funds Association, or NEFTA. The chairman of NEFTA is John T. Hyland, the chief investment officer of United States Commodity Fund, the firm behind the U.S. Oil Fund USO and the U.S. Natural Gas Fund UNG. NEFTA's vice chairman is IndexIQ CEO Adam Patti. IndexIQ sponsors the IndexIQ Merger Arbitrage ETF MNA and the IndexIQ Canada Small Cap ETF CNDA among others. The focus of the NETFA is to educate institutional and retail investors, as well as the advisor community, on the benefits and uses of ETFs. NETFA will provide industry statistics and commentary on ETF related issues to the US financial media, and advance industry issues with regulators, government agencies and interested third parties, according to a statement issued by NEFTA. "Once an industry sector achieves a certain scale, it can no longer depend on ad-hoc efforts by individual companies, or the efforts of non-ETF industry groups, to represent itself to the public or to the regulators," Patti said in the statement. "This is the first step in a long journey to establish a professional and coordinated approach to the topics of investor education and industry representation." Membership in NETFA will be open to any Exchange Traded Fund issuer or sponsor. There is also a class of membership for firms that are active in the ETF industry, but are not issuers of ETFs. For more information on NEFTA, the Web site is http://www.nationaletf.org/