In the world of investing, tradition is king, and lengthy histories carry significant weight with an investing public that is surprisingly entrenched in its ways. As creatures of habit, investors are slow to part with familiar strategies and metrics that have lengthy histories. Take the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for example. The “Dow” has several major flaws as an index (it’s a price-weighted benchmark composed of 30 mega-cap equities), but it is one of the widely-followed numbers in the world and is held out as a barometer of U.S equity performance by everyone from major Wall Street banks to local newspapers. [click to continue…]
Usually the monthly release of ETF trading data from the National Stock Exchange provides a good opportunity for those covering the industry to feed the hype machine just a little more. Big asset growth and cash inflows have become as certain as death and taxes, with each month adding momentum to the runaway freight train that is the ETF industry. [click to continue…]
Fidelity Investments announced today that it will offer its retail customers commission-free online trades for a suite of 25 iShares ETFs. The funds included in the commission-free platform include ETFs in all nine domestic equity style/size categories, as well as international equity and fixed income options. “Fidelity has partnered with the leading ETF provider in [...]
Coming soon to an ETF near you: Warren Buffett. Well not exactly, but shares of Berkshire Hathaway, the company run by the “Oracle of Omaha” will soon be included in the S&P 500 Index and find a home in many of the most popular large-cap and all-cap ETFs.
After launching more than 120 new funds last year, the ETF industry seems poised to continue its rapid growth in 2010. Numerous issuers have big plans for this year, with the number of new product launches expected to once again exceed 100 and perhaps even top last year’s results. A recent SEC filing shed some [...]
The reasons for the rise of the ETF industry are numerous: intraday liquidity, (potentially) superior tax efficiency, and enhanced transparency relative to traditional actively-managed mutual funds have all contributed to the billions of dollars of inflows that these funds have seen in recent years. But the real attraction for most ETF investors is the reduced [...]
At the core of many investor portfolios is an allocation to large cap domestic equities. Because large cap stocks generally have long operating histories, established customer bases, and sufficient cash on hand, they are perceived as the least risky of equity investments, strongly correlated with mid cap and small cap stocks but less volatile than [...]
Boasting competitive cost structures, enhanced tax efficiencies, and improved liquidity features, ETFs have quickly become one of the most popular tools for all types of investors. But despite the rapid rise of the industry over the last five years, there are still countless investors, including many financial advisors, who are completely unaware of exchange-traded funds. [...]
Charles Schwab, one of the country’s largest asset managers with more than $200 billion in assets under management, has made quite an entrance into the ETF arena. The San Francisco-based company announced the launch of its first eight exchange-traded funds, including four that will begin trading on Tuesday. Each of the exchange-traded products from Schwab [...]
The S&P 500 is one of the most widely-followed benchmarks in the world, a bellweather of the American economy that is included in the Index of Leading Indicators. Composed of 500 of the largest stocks listed in the U.S. (as well as a handful of non-U.S. companies), the S&P 500 has a weighted average market [...]
Over the last year, leveraged ETFs have been the subject of intense scrutiny from a number of parties, including regulatory agencies, state governments, broker-dealers, individual investors, and even class action lawyers. While several aspects of leveraged ETFs have been thoroughly analyzed and debated, perhaps no issue has drawn more attention than the effects of compounding [...]
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s been another good month for the ETF industry. A continued strong performance from the equity markets gave investors a boost, and cash continued to flow into ETFs. According to data from the National Stock Exchange, total ETF assets increased from $650 billion in July to [...]
