Products November 7, 2006

Rydex Expands ETF Offering

November 7, 2006 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Rydex Investments has announced the launch of nine equal weight sector exchange traded funds (ETFs) based on the S&P Equal Weight Sector Indices.
Reported by

According to the announcement, the new funds will give investors full exposure to the consumer discretionary, consumer staples, energy, financial services, health care, industrial, basic materials, technologies and utilities sectors. The Rydex S&P Equal Weight Sector ETFs divide all stocks in an index equally.

Using equal weighting, Rydex seeks to outperform capitalization-weighted funds, which give more weight to the largest stocks within an index, the announcement said. Equal weighting helps to avoid single-stock risk and provides exposure to smaller sector stocks.

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANSPONSOR NEWSDash daily newsletter.

The funds will be rebalanced quarterly to help maintain equal weighting, promote greater diversification, and promote higher exposure to value stocks, Rydex said.

“Although the comparative returns and volatilities of the weighting methods might differ during market cycles, we’ve seen that, over time, equal weighting tends to outperform cap weighting,” says Tim Meyer, ETF business line manager at Rydex Investments, in the announcement.

The addition of the nine funds expands Rydex’s ETF offering to 24.

For more information, go to www.rydexinvestments.com .

Benefits November 6, 2006

PBM Fee Transparency Affects Employers' Performance Perception

November 6, 2006 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - A recent survey has found a link between perceived financial transparency of pharmacy benefit managers and client satisfaction.
Reported by

The 2006 Pharmacy Benefit Manager Customer Satisfaction Report by the Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute (PBMI) found that employers who are “extremely satisfied” with financial transparency of their PBM (26%) gave their PBMs an average overall service rating of 8.9 on a 10-point scale, while employers that were “somewhat satisfied,” gave performance ratings averaging 7.8. For those that were “somewhat dissatisfied” or “extremely dissatisfied” with financial transparency, the performance rating continued to drop to 6.7 and 6.2, respectively.

Slightly more than half of the survey respondents (56%) see their relationships with their pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) as “somewhat transparent,” while 28% say their relationship is “completely transparent,” according to a press release on the survey.

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANSPONSOR NEWSDash daily newsletter.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they are “somewhat satisfied” with the degree of transparency and 26% are “extremely satisfied.

The PBMI report includes the survey responses for 540 employers and can be purchased at http://www.pbmi.com

«