Rydex wants to educate consumers about what an ETF really is. At a press conference today at the Soho Grand Hotel in New York City, Tim Meyer, the ETF business manager at Rydex, told a roomful of reporters that in a survey conducted by Rydex personnel of 500 mutual fund investors, 53 percent of those surveyed didn't know the difference between an ETF and a mutual fund. Thirty-eight percent did not even know what an ETF was.

Rydex is aiming to change this number with its new ETF Essentials initiative, which will teach investors and advisors alike ETF basics like liquidity, pricing, creation and redemption. The program will share the information with investors via a printed guide, pod-casts and the Web.

"The ETF industry now is comparable to what the mutual fund industry was in the early 1980's," David Reilly, director of portfolio strategies, said at the press conference. Consumers need to be educated on where these strategies will fit in with their investment goals, he added.

Rydex may be on to something that will up their market share in the ultra-competitive ETF game. In its survey, 35 percent of mutual fund investors indicated that they would like to learn more about ETFs and 63 percent cited lack of knowledge as the reason they do not already invest in ETFs.  

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