I Don't Know What To Make Of This

I stumbled across this article and I have to say I am befuddled but open to learning more about this.

The fund company in the article is a shop called PMFM. They manage a series of OEFs that are comprised of ETFs. You can read more with the link provided but there have been three funds in existence and this article announces a new fund coming that also invests in ETFs.

The existing funds are managed by a committee. The expenses for the three existing funds are 2.5%, 1.87% and 2.5%, again, respectively, according to the company site. I don't know enough about this type of product to know whether that includes the 10, 20, or 30 basis points an ETF might charge.

The expenses seem expensive to be sure. If a fund can consistently beat its benchmark by several hundred basis point every year ( there are managers that do this) an extra 100 or 150 basis points in expenses may not be the worst thing in the world.

All three of the existing funds have lagged the S+P 500 (admittedly SPX may not be the benchmark of any of them). You can click on each investor class symbol to look at a chart comparing it to the SPX. ETFMX, ETFGX and ETFTX. The largest of the three funds has over $100 million and the other two have less than $20 million. Morningstar does not rate any of them.

The results of the funds don't seem to merit any investment capital. The funds are very expensive and they lag. If you look at the holdings, Morningstar might be better for this than Yahoo, they own all broad based ETFs and I'm thinking there are some instances of duplication (meaning a couple of the ETFs owned by a fund have a high correlation) especially with ETFMX.

Here is how one of the funds, ETFTX, is allocated. It has 38% in IWM, 21% in QQQQ, 19% in SPY, 11% in SPX futures and 8% in Nasdaq E-mini futures. Should anyone be paying 2.5% for that? Should anyone be paying anything for that?

I am not trying to be funny but I am having trouble seeing how this is ethical. There are various subscriptions services available that make use of all types of ETFs and put forth much more of an effort than what I think I am seeing with the PMFM funds. Maybe its me, maybe I am wrong about this, maybe the new fund will turn around the whole shop.