It's about to get a lot easier to bet on the backbone of the stock market

The world's biggest provider of exchange-traded funds is giving US investors a new way to bet on companies that repurchase their own shares. iShares, the ETF business within the investment titan BlackRock, just filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a fund designed to track stocks with a history of share buybacks and dividend payments. The iShares US Dividend and Buyback ETF (ticker to be determined) is designed to track the Morningstar US Dividend and ...