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Our experts frequently write blog posts about the findings of the research we are conducting.

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Displaying 31-40 out of 45 results for "ETF".

Are ETF Flows Costly to ETF Investors?

(Apr 2013)

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are often lauded for their ability to efficiently create or redeem shares in response to changes in demand for the fund (known as fund flows). However, new research suggests that some ETFs that hold international securities may face transactional frictions that prevent them from tracking their benchmarks as well as other ETFs.

When there is an imbalance between supply and demand for an ETF, authorized participants (APs) create or redeem shares of the ETF to...

New Study Comparing Indexed and Actively Managed Funds

(Apr 2013)

NerdWallet, a San Francisco based personal investing site, has performed a historical study of the returns on almost 8,000 mutual funds and ETFs over a ten year period and found that passive indexed funds tend to outperform actively managed funds on average. In fact, they found that only 24% of actively managed funds outperformed the average return of the indexed funds. These results are consistent with the annual SPIVA Scorecard produced by S&P Dow Jones Indices, which found in both 2012...

Eaton Vance, Transparency, and Exchange-Traded Managed Funds (ETMFs)

(Apr 2013)

Eaton Vance (EV) made a splash yesterday when they announced an application with the SEC for approval of a new type of open-end fund they call "Exchange-Traded Managed Funds" or ETMFs. Since the announcement, several bloggers have commented on the implications of such products, such as Brendan Conway at Barrons and Olly Ludwig at IndexUniverse.

In August 2011, the Financial Times reported the uncovering of patents -- U.S. Patent Nos. 7,444,300, 7,689,501, 7,496,531, 8,131,621, 8,306,901 and...

TD Ameritrade Data Suggests Retail Investors Use ETFs in 'Sophisticated Ways'

(Mar 2013)

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are increasingly popular among retail investors. ETFs tend to have lower expense ratios than comparable mutual funds, and can be traded intraday like stock, giving them a comparable advantage that has proven attractive. The number of ETF issuers has grown, and that competition has driven down prices in what has become known in the financial press as the "ETF Fee War".

TD Ameritrade has produced an infographic that shows how their clients use ETFs, and the results...

SPIVA Scorecard Year-End 2012

(Mar 2013)

S&P Dow Jones Indices recently released their year-end 2012 report comparing the performance of actively managed mutual funds against their benchmark indices (we covered the year-end 2011 report previously). The S&P Indices Versus Active Funds (SPIVA) Scorecard once again shows that, for the most part, mutual funds tend to underperform their benchmarks:

The year 2012 marked the return of the double digit gains across all the domestic and global equity benchmark indices. The gains passive...

Barclays' Structured Product Linked to a Basket of ETFs and Indexes

(Mar 2013)

RISK.net recently posted an article entitled "IWM urges investors to think about risk-adjusted returns" in the structured products portion of their website. The article describes in detail a Barclays product for which Institute for WealthManagement, LLC (IWM) served as the basket selection agent. Interestingly, the basket is composed mostly of ETFs, which have been appearing in structured products more frequently as the ETF industry itself has become more mature. IWM's Matt Medeiros talked...

Persistence and Mean Reversion in Market Data

(Mar 2013)

Jason Voss at the CFA Institute has recently written a very interesting series of posts on the Hurst exponent, which is "a method for detecting persistence, randomness, or mean reversion in financial markets." The Hurst exponent measures the degree to which a signal depends on previous values--a phenomenon known as autocorrelation--and specifically whether values tend to 'switch' (e.g., high values followed by low values) or 'persist' (e.g., high values followed by other high values). Jason...

SEC Examination Priorities 2013

(Feb 2013)

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced their examination priorities for 2013 "to communicate with investors and registrants about areas that are perceived by the staff to have heightened risk, and to support the SEC's mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation."

For those that are unfamiliar, SEC staff conducts examinations of SEC registrants through their regional offices and headquarters

to determine...

How Big of an Effect Does Securities Lending Have on ETF Returns?

(Feb 2013)

We earlier posted an analysis that compared ETF returns to their stated index net of fees for funds that lend securities and those that do not. IndexUniverse subsequently suggested an approach with methodological differences from our original work and we wanted to address some of those differences here.

For our sample, we used Bloomberg's ETF function to collect all US-domiciled, USD-denominated exchange-traded funds and removed any with active trading strategies, leverage, or inception dates...

Securities Lending by ETFs

(Feb 2013)

One of the most contentious but least understood aspects of the stock market is short selling. Short selling refers to selling a stock that you do not own at current market prices, with the hopes that the stock will go down in price. The stock can be purchased in the market at any time to close out the position and, if the stock has decreased in price, the short-seller will realize a profit. Obviously, the only way to accomplish this is by borrowing that stock from someone else.

Typically,...

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