Essential features of ETF's

In this article, we’ll go over some fundamental concepts about exchange-traded funds (ETF’s). To comprehend what an ETF is and what its qualities are, we must first provide a brief overview of mutual funds. A mutual fund is an investment company that pools money from investors to buy a variety of stocks, bonds, and other securities on their behalf. A portfolio is a collection of the underlying constituents. The firms that create these mutual funds assign a manager to oversee the investments. The basic concept is to give smaller amounts of capital easy access to diversification through a single purchase. An investor purchases a piece of a portfolio of his choosing. From the perspective of an investor, the mutual fund is easy. They essentially submit the investment to the mutual fund corporation. If they use a brokerage account, they will see shares of the mutual fund appear in their account, or they will receive a statement directly from the firm revealing their fund position. The ETF's are a type of mutual fund that incorporates a number of more contemporary features. The first ETF listed on the New York stock exchange (NYSE) in 1993 was created to track the S&P 500 index . An exchange-traded fund ( ETF ) is a pooled investment vehicle that is listed on a stock exchange, allowing investors to buy and sell its shares at a market-determined price during the trading day. They follow the same rules as any publicly traded stock, and they offer transparency and a central hub for all of their underlying asset classes. ETFs can be used to monitor the performance of an underlying index, commodity, or portfolio of assets. If you want to track a particular index, you don't have to buy shares in any of the companies that make up the index. Let’s look at the characteristics of this product structure and why it is taking the investment world by storm. The main ones are: 1. Transparency 2. Exchange listing 3. Tax efficiency 4. Lower fees 5. Diversity Transparency All investors benefit from portfolio transparency because it protects them from risk. An investor must recognize that no other fund product on the market gives a daily accounting of the fund's holdings like the ETF . Portfolio holdings were traditionally only published quarterly or semiannually. ETFs make their portfolios available to the public on a daily basis. Exchange listing There are three major benefits of exchanging listing: Standardization Intraday trading Liquidity Standardization is a huge benefit for holding the same multi-asset portfolios all within the same account structure. Instead of having two separate parts of your portfolio with associated problems, you can now keep your bond position wrapped in an ETF structure within your investment account. You can also include your commodity piece as well as your alternate options. Intraday trading has been a feature that has proven to be both beneficial and detrimental Liquidity - Listing a product on an exchange and introducing it to a broader range of market participants in a standardized format will increase liquidity and reduce spreads beyond what was previously available. In the market, you can often see instances where the ETF price is trading between the underlying basket's "bid" and "ask" spread. The ability to access liquidity within the bid and ask of the underlying assets is a benefit that mutual fund portfolio managers and investors do not have. Tax efficiency The major tax advantage of the ETF structure within the portfolio management process derives from the concept of in-kind “creation” and “redemption.” The process is complicated and it has to do with the daily operations of the ETF in the primary and secondary market versus the ones of a mutual fund. Lower fees The introduction of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to the market has resulted in a large reduction in the fees that investors must pay in order to obtain a wide range of easy-to-manage exposures as building blocks for a portfolio. This is important for investors because it allows them to keep their positions without worrying about gains being distributed to other investors who are buying and leaving the ETF , as is the case with mutual funds. Diversity The thousands of exchange-traded funds presently available offer a wide range of exposures. Investors can choose from a wide range of ETFs to achieve their desired exposure. This could include anything from main indices to overseas fixed income, leveraged commodity bets, and everything in between. Traditional benchmarks are also evolving as a result of ETFs. ETFs are no longer bound by conventional index schemes. The industry has developed to question how each index is built and what benefit it provides to investors.