One of the “most helpful plain-English resources for investors who want to demystify exchange-traded funds” – Bloomberg Businessweek
Will Rhind, Founder & CEO of GraniteShares, dives into their YieldBOOST lineup of ETFs and offers perspective on the growing demand for options-based ETF strategies overall. Zeno Mercer, Senior Research Analyst at VettaFi, breaks down one of the hottest segments in the market: artificial intelligence ETFs. He covers fund flows, performance trends, and the key drivers behind investor interest.
ETF Prime is hosted by Nate Geraci. Learn how to make ETFs a part of your investment portfolio as Nate spotlights individual ETFs and interviews experts from across the country. ETF Prime is available on Apple Podcasts, Android, Spotify, and most other major podcasting platforms. Specific guest interviews can be accessed by visiting the ETF Expert Corner.
If you’re new to ETFs, CNBC recently released an excellent short video providing a nice overview on Exchange Traded Funds and their potential benefits compared to mutual funds. Watch below:
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000147234
For additional information on ETFs and how they compare to mutual funds, download our free report “The ETF Advantage” by clicking here.
Listen to The ETF Store Show every Tuesday at 9am on ESPN 1510 as we cover everything you need to know about Exchange Traded Funds and the world of investing.
Click here to listen to The ETF Store Show now.
On our most recent radio broadcast, Ari Weinberg, contributor to The Wall Street Journal, joined us to discuss his recent article “Firms Try Varied Designs to Add ETFs”. As investors continue to gravitate towards ETFs, traditional mutual fund companies are seeing the writing on the wall and searching for the best way to launch new ETF products. Ari offered some thoughts on what’s driving mutual fund companies to enter the ETF space and explained the three primary options that these firms are considering to launch ETF versions of existing mutual funds or new funds altogether. Ari also chatted about an interesting article that we discussed last fall, “What ETFs Next Act Will Look Like”, where he examined what investors might expect to see from ETFs over the next five years.
In our weekly market update, we spent a few moments digging into last year’s performance from mutual funds, ETFs, and even hedge funds. While we’ve talked about the underperformance of mutual funds on past shows, the data from 2012 – particularly from hedge funds – continued to highlight the challenges active managers face in trying to outperform the market. Lastly, in our ETF spotlight segment, we highlighted a country specific ETF (WisdomTree Japan Hedged Equity ETF – ticker DXJ) that not only hedges its currency exposure, but also has a unique way of weighting the individual stocks that it holds.
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Charles Schwab, in a move sure to ripple across the entire ETF industry, announced on Thursday the launch of Schwab ETF OneSource, described as “a new ETF platform that gives investors and advisors access to the most commission-free ETFs anywhere in the industry”. For all of the potential benefits that ETFs can provide investors – from lower costs and greater tax efficiency, to more transparency and better diversification – one knock has always been trading commissions. Since ETFs trade on the exchanges, just like individual stocks, investors typically must pay a trading commission when buying or selling shares. With the rollout of Schwab’s ETF OneSource platform, investors can buy or sell shares of 105 ETFs – including all 15 of Schwab’s ETFs – without incurring trading commissions.
While Schwab isn’t the first to rollout such an offering (TD Ameritrade already offers 101 commission free ETFs), the introduction of Schwab ETF OneSource further signals the arrival of ETFs at a time when mutual funds continue to cede assets to ETFs. Said Charles Schwab’s CEO Walt Bettinger, “Just as Schwab Mutual Fund OneSource changed the landscape for investors and advisors by providing convenient, affordable access to leading mutual funds when Chuck Schwab introduced it twenty years ago, we believe Schwab ETF OneSource will deliver enormous benefit and change the way our clients buy and sell ETFs”. While mutual funds may have been the preferred way to go for investors 20 years ago, Schwab seems to be acknowledging that investors are now gravitating towards ETFs.
The reasons why investors are moving to ETFs are plentiful. As Bettinger explained in Schwab’s announcement, “Today’s investors, and the advisors who serve them, want sophisticated, low-cost strategies and more control over their investment choices and outcomes”. At The ETF Store, we believe ETFs provide us with the ability to offer more sophisticated, lower cost strategies to our clients while at the same time allowing a greater level of control over things such as active manager risk, buy/sell decisions, and taxable events. As we discussed with Schwab’s Director of ETF Capital Markets back in October, investors continue to be the clear winners of the continued innovation and competition in the ETF space. With Schwab’s ETF platform, it’s our belief that the benefits of ETFs for investors just keep getting better.
Listen to The ETF Store Show every Tuesday at 9am on ESPN 1510 as we cover everything you need to know about Exchange Traded Funds and the world of investing.
Click here to listen to The ETF Store Show now.
On our most recent radio broadcast, we discussed a Fortune Magazine article titled “The Great ETF Mega-War”, which included several noteworthy data points relating to ETF fund flows and fees. Regarding fund flows for both mutual funds and ETFs, the article stated: “The mutual fund industry has seen steady outflows from equity funds in the past few years — $122 billion in the first 11 months of 2012, according to ICI. During the same period, $100.6 billion moved into equity ETFs”. Pertaining to fees, the article examined the so-called ETF price war between Vanguard, State Street, and iShares: “Vanguard isn’t just the cheapest of the three. Its fees — 0.15% of assets for stock ETFs — are about a quarter of the average 0.56% for equity ETFs, according to data through September provided by Lipper. (The equivalent figure for mutual funds is 1.29%)”.
We explored some of the key factors driving investors out of equity mutual funds and into equity ETFs, not the least of which is obviously the lower ETF fees highlighted in the second point above. We further noted that the takeaway here is not so much that Vanguard ETFs are perhaps cheaper than some of the other ETFs, but that the Vanguard equity ETFs average almost 1.15% less than the average equity mutual fund. We also explained how even with more investors turning bullish in January with the S&P 500 up over 6%, investors still preferred to access US equities through ETFs (with this additional food for thought from Reuters: “ETFs are generally believed to represent the investment behavior of institutional investors, while mutual funds are thought to represent the retail investor”).
In addition to covering the Fortune Magazine article, we also fielded several listener questions including an interesting one on the Health Care Select SPDR ETF (ticker XLV). In our weekly market update, we discussed the Dow Jones Industrial Average finally crossing over the 14,000 mark for the first time since October 2007 and what that could mean for bonds. Finally, in our ETF spotlight segment, we highlighted an extremely low cost, broad based US equity ETF, the Schwab U.S. Broad Market ETF (ticker SCHB), and compared this ETF to a mutual fund behemoth – the American Funds Growth Fund of America.