In Monday's Wall Street Journal Fund Track column, Ian Salisbury reports that the credit crunch and falling commodity prices have prompted investors to pull $450 million out of $5.5 billion in 90 exchange-traded notes monitored by Morningstar. The largest ETN, Barclay's $2.7 billion iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index Total Return, saw 12 percent of outstanding shares redeemed during the month through Thursday.

Barclays sees an end to the outflows. "We believe the outflows across commodity investment products, such as ETNs or ETFs, are only temporary," a Barclays spokesperson told Salisbury. "The exchange-traded product market will continue to grow and there will continue to be new products offered to investors."

As for ETFs, assets have declined about 30 percent this year. While ETFs have had net buying of upwards of $100 billion this year, the market drop has reduced assets from $620 billion at the end of last year to $440 billion as of October 27. 

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