As part of the WSJ's special monthly section "Investing in Funds", Leslie Scism and Jaclyne Badal take a look at which ETFs launched in 2007 captured investors' dollars. Scism and Badal identify four trends in ETF buying: foreign focused ETFs are hot; U.S. ETFs making bearish bets are, too; investors like diversity (narrowly focused and obscure vehicles failed to capture dollars) and bigger companies with experienced sales forces (i.e. Barclays Global Investors, State Street, Vanguard and PowerShares) had 34 of the 50 biggest ETFs that launched in 2007. One factor that did not play into what ETFs investors bought was expense. Scism and Badal found no clear pattern of how this affected investors' choices.  

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