ProShares – best known for its leveraged and inverse ETF lineup – has recently announced that it will close and liquidate 17 ETFs. The issuer currently has roughly 150 products listed in the U.S. markets spread across various categories such as Inverse Bonds, Inverse Equities, Currency, Financials Equities, Hedge Fund, Volatility and Leveraged Commodities. The 17 ETFs to be shuttered represent roughly 11% of total ETFs for the company.

Most of the ETFs to be closed belong to the leverage and inverse strategies category and have been unsuccessful in gathering decent assets. All the products to be closed have less than $20 million of assets under management (AUM), with most of them managing under $5 million AUM. The funds will cease to trade by January 9, and ProShares expects to distribute the proceeds of the liquidation to shareholders by January 22 (read: Top ETF Stories of 2014 Worth Watching in 2015).

Below we have highlighted the list of 17 ETFs to be closed along with their fund size.

 
Including the recently announced fund closure, more than 85 ETF products were shut down or had closures announced in 2014, as per etf.com. In comparison, we have had more than 190 new product launched in 2014. With the recent launches, the fast evolving U.S. ETF industry now has more than 1660 products in the market with a total market cap of more than $2 trillion (read: 5 Very Successful ETF Launches of 2014).

In spite of ProShares closing the above mentioned products, it still continues to rule the leveraged and inverse ETF space, managing popular products like ProShares UltraShort 20 Year Treasury (TBT - ETF report) and ProShares Ultra S&P 500 (SSO - ETF report). While TBT manages an AUM of $3.1 billion and trades with roughly 3 million shares a day, SSO has an asset base of $2.4 billion with average trading volume of 5 million shares in a normal session.

In fact, the issuer has recently filed for two products – Short Junior Gold Miners ETF and UltraShort Junior Gold Miners ETF to further strengthen its foothold in the leveraged and inverse ETF space, so 2015 still appears to be bright for this popular issuer (read: ProShares Proposes Two Junior Gold Miners Bear ETFs).