Welcome to the ETF Prime Podcast
One of the “most helpful plain-English resources for investors who want to demystify exchange-traded funds” – Bloomberg Businessweek
Latest Episode
Rethinking Sector ETFs & Baron Capital’s ETF Debut
Michael Cohick, Director of Product Management at VanEck, breaks down the firm’s lineup of TruSector ETFs and how they aim to address tracking error caused by regulatory diversification limits – constraints that can force traditional sector funds to underweight the largest companies in their benchmarks. Matt Camuso, Head of ETF Solutions at Baron Capital, discusses the firm’s recent entry into the ETF space and outlines its distinctive approach to actively managed growth equity investing, including the Baron First Principles ETF (RONB).
About the Podcast
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.
Recent Episodes
Mutual Fund Tax Pain
One of the biggest benefits ETFs provide investors is they can cut your tax bill. Because of their legal structure and minimal trading, ETFs typically distribute very little, if any, capital gains to investors. As The Motley Fool explains, the same is not true for mutual funds. Adding salt to the wound this year: some investors are going to be paying heavy taxes on capital gains – – even though their funds might be down 40%!
So, what can you do to protect yourself? If you must buy a mutual fund, wait until after the fund pays out its capital gains before you buy. You can generally check with the mutual fund provider website to find that date.
If you already own a fund and it hasn’t yet paid its capital gains distribution, you can avoid the distribution and still retain much of the performance of the fund by selling the fund and buying a highly correlated ETF at the same time.
One place to start your search for a suitable ETF replacement is at the free correlation calculator here. Click on the field ‘correlation cloud’, then type in your mutual fund ticker along with a few ETFs that you think might be a good match (you need 5 tickers to run the program). Any result in the high 90’s means the ETF is likely a candidate for replacement for your fund.