Jonathan Chevreau's column in today's Financial Post provides more data on the Claymore ETFs of which I spoke in a recent posting (ETFs' I've Seen This Movie Before).

The column reinforced some of the views I put forward:

• ETFs are moving away from what they do best - provide broad market exposure at rock bottom prices.
• ETFs are rapidly becoming marketing vehicles. Trailer fees are pushing MERs up towards 1.5% in some cases (for funds that are still just index products).
• There are new flavours coming at us regularly. As Chevreau points out, Claymore has a knack for picking trendy markets.

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, I still think the low-cost, broad market ETFs are excellent products, in particular, the iShares XICs, which track the S&P/TSX 60 Index and have an MER of 17 basis points.

As investors move away from the simple ETFs, however, they'd better know what they're doing.