March 28 (Bloomberg) -- Money-management firms have spent years pushing to introduce U.S. exchange-traded funds that are actively managed, rather than index-based. Now that the first one has debuted, it's hard to see what the fuss is all about.

Bear Stearns Current Yield Fund, listed on the American Stock Exchange, came out three days ago. While 26,000 shares changed hands on the opening day, only 2,600 traded the next day. Yesterday's total, 3,000 shares, was equally dismal.

The fund, with $50 million or so in assets, owns debt with an average maturity of 180 days and trades under the ticker YYY. The symbol is appropriate because three ``why'' questions come to mind when considering its introduction.

1) Why did Bear Stearns Cos., the New York-based firm that JPMorgan Chase & Co. rescued earlier this month after its near- collapse, get to go first?

2) Why start with a bond fund when equity funds dominate the current lineup of U.S. ETFs -- about 700, according to data compiled by Bloomberg -- and account for almost all the trading?

3) Why bring out funds whose ease of trading inhibits their managers from pursuing buy-and-hold strategies, which tend to be more rewarding over time because they are less costly?

Each is worth addressing because the ``Triple-Y,'' Bear Stearns's moniker for the Current Yield Fund, will soon have company. PowerShares Capital Management LLC, owned by Invesco Ltd., got regulatory clearance for four active ETFs this week. Units of Barclays Plc and State Street Corp. plan to introduce them. So do Vanguard Group Inc. and WisdomTree Investments Inc.

Next Frontier

Active management is the latest wrinkle for ETFs, which began 15 years ago with the introduction of Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts, or Spiders.

Spiders are a passive investment because they track the performance of an index, namely the Standard & Poor's 500. Every other ETF introduced before this week takes a similar approach.

As the popularity of these funds increased, firms went to greater and greater lengths to develop indexes that would work for ETFs. The results include indexes of stocks with little or no analyst coverage, companies known for their patents, and health-care firms pursuing treatments for specific diseases.

Now come active ETFs, which do away with the index while preserving an essential feature: the ability to buy their shares and sell the underlying securities, or vice versa, to keep their prices in line with asset values. Bear Stearns publishes Current Yield's holdings daily to help make this possible.

Equity Debut

While PowerShares was the first firm authorized to start them, Bear Stearns went public first. The debut was delayed a week because of the firm's brush with failure. JPMorgan, based in New York, plans to rename the fund after buying the firm.

PowerShares may have the category's first stock funds, as three of the four active ETFs from the Wheaton, Illinois-based firm are going to invest in equities. The other will own bonds.

How the managers of active ETFs cope with the day-to-day effects of buying and selling may largely dictate whether this new type of fund catches on with investors. This assumes, of course, that they are busier than the Bear Stearns fund is.

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ConAgra Foods Inc.'s sale of its commodity trading and merchandising business for $2.1 billion will cap a three-decade transformation into a packaged-foods maker from a crop producer. Many shareholders have yet to benefit from the strategic shift.

Even after rising 7.1 percent yesterday on the sale agreement, along with a higher profit forecast for the fiscal year ending in May, ConAgra's stock was below its price at the end of 1996. The Omaha, Nebraska-based company, which finished that year at $24.88, closed yesterday at $23.45.

ConAgra also has gone longer without setting an all-time high than any other member of the S&P 500 Packaged Foods Index, consisting of a dozen stocks. Its record is $38.75, reached in December 1997.

Selling the trading unit to Ospraie Management LLC, a New York-based hedge fund that specializes in commodities and basic industries, will allow ConAgra to concentrate on increasing its consumer-food revenue. The maker of Orville Redenbacher popcorn and Slim Jim meat snacks needs all the focus it can muster.

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One of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's opponents in an election this weekend plans to float the country's currency if he prevails, according to a spokesman. Maybe he should be more careful about what he wishes for.

Simba Makoni's position, outlined by campaign coordinator Noksana Moyo, flies in the face of Argentina's success in using a currency peg to revive its economy during the 1990s. Fixing the value of the Argentine peso at one dollar tamed runaway inflation, which peaked at 5,000 percent.

While Zimbabwe also has an official peg, set at 30,000 to the dollar since Sept. 6, the country has a far greater need to curtail inflation than Argentina did. January's rate surpassed 100,000 percent, according to government data, and the local currency's purchasing power has plunged accordingly.

The Zimbabwean dollar is valued at 43.5 million to the U.S. currency, based on a comparison of Old Mutual Plc's share price yesterday in Harare, the capital city, and London. Eliminating the peg would only drive home the extent of the depreciation.

(David Wilson is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: David Wilson in New York at dwilson@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 28, 2008 00:01 EDT