On Tuesday, X Exchange Traded Funds pulled its registration statement for Haverford Quality 250 Fund, an ETF that had been sitting in the queue since January 2008.

The Haverford fund would have tracked the Haverford Quality 250 Index, a fundamental index that screens firms based on their S&P grades and weights the remaining 250 names by dividends paid.

The fundamental indexing field has gotten crowded in recent months, with incumbents such as WisdomTree and PowerShares RAFI enjoying a sizable head start over upstarts like this ETF. We've seen a few additional fundamental index-tracking ETFs launch recently--the RevenueShares family is one example. But new entrants will face an uphill battle, which the Haverford fund evidently wasn't able to win.

It's also possible that the Haverford index's backtest didn't look so hot given that financials soaked-up nearly 40% of the benchmark entering 2007, while energy stocks accounted for only 5%, which was precisely the wrong trade to put on last year. (Unfortunately, the perfomance stats on the index didn't run past 12/31/06, so it's hard to know for sure).

This brings to 21 the number of ETFs that have been withdrawn from the registration queue thus far in 2008, as XShares pulled 20 IndexIQ ETFs earlier this year. XShares also figures into this withdrawal, as it would have served as the advisor of the Haverford fund.

As of this writing, XShares still has about 35 other ETFs sitting in the pipeline, more than half of which are the (very daffy) StateShares. Given that XShares-managed ETFs have struggled mightily to gather assets thus far--24 of the 31 funds that the firm advises had no more than $10 million in assets as of 3/31/08 and 22 of those funds had less than $5 million--we would not be surprised to see the firm cull additional ETFs from the registration queue as time wears on.