PowerShares Corporate Bond ETF Wins ETF Product of the Year

Invesco's IVZ PowerShares, the fourth-largest U.S. ETF issuer by assets, said its PowerShares Fundamental High Yield Corporate Bond Portfolio PHB won the William F. Sharpe Award for ETF Product of the Year at the 2011 Super Bowl of Indexing Conference. The ETF Product of the Year is awarded to the company responsible for the ETF product that had the most significant impact on the ETF market over the previous twelve months, PowerShares said in a statement. “The William F. Sharpe Awards recognize the best and the brightest innovators in the field of indexing, ETFs, and investment management," said Ben Fulton, Invesco PowerShares managing director of global ETFs, in the release. "We are quite honored to receive the highly regarded ETF Product of the Year award recognizing the innovative investment opportunity the PowerShares Fundamental High Yield(R) Corporate Bond Portfolio provides investors.” PHB is the first bond ETF to use Research Affiliates' Fundamental Index methodology, which uses fundamental factors such as company size, including book value of assets, sales, dividends and cash flow, to set constituent weights. Other bond ETFs typically include large weights to the index's biggest debtors, increasing investor exposure to default risk. PHB, which debuted in November 2007, has $606.1 million in assets under management, 205 holdings and an expense ratio of 0.5%. The ETF's effective duration is 4.25 years with a distribution yield of 5.31%. At the start of trading today, PHB was down two-thirds of a percent year-to-date.