With its pitch to sell a new kind of exchange-traded fund held up by regulators, T. Rowe Price Group Inc. may turn to traditional ETFs to get started in that market, a spokesman told Reuters.

The Baltimore fund company, which manages $766 billion in mutual funds and other investment products, is one of the top asset managers not to offer a lineup of ETFs, in part because traditional ETF structures require that stock pickers disclose their holdings daily.

Fund managers, who want to protect the privacy of their investment-choosing strategy, view the disclosures as a threat.

T. Rowe Price applied to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2013 to introduce so-called "non-transparent" ETFs, which allow for the kind of active management its traditional funds are known for, but with less frequent portfolio disclosures. But it now finds that application on the slow track in Washington.

Instead, the company now may explore offering ETFs that use quantitative methods to pick stocks and other securities, or to offer bond ETFs, said T. Rowe Price representative Brian Lewbart, who spoke to Reuters last week. He declined to comment further.

"We are not prepared to discuss potential specific products at this time, and don't have a set time frame," said Lewbart.

Just one fund company has found a way for so-called active managers to bypass the daily-disclosure requirements. The company, Eaton Vance Corp, launched its first such "NextShares" fund on February 26 and is licensing the right to launch such funds to its industry competitors.

But T. Rowe Price and other asset managers, including BlackRock Inc., have applications pending before the SEC for their own "non-transparent" ETFs.
The timeline for considering such applications has been pushed out, Lewbart said, following a bout of volatility on Aug. 24 that caused a number of popular ETFs to trade at prices far below the quoted value of their holdings.

The dysfunctional trading that day raised new questions for regulators about the ability of the funds and equity markets more broadly to manage a spell of heavy selling pressure.

A spokesman for the SEC declined to comment.