Word: etfs
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...number of ETFs in the U.S. market shot up to 934 in 2009 from 154 in 2004, according to Larry Petrone, director of research at Financial Research Corp. Over that time, ETF assets under management have more than tripled, to $742 billion. That's still far short of the $7.14 trillion in assets held by mutual funds, but the ETF growth rate is fast closing that gap, with new products covering every subsector of the markets, from bank stocks to silver to Vietnam's public companies. (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers...
Basically, ETFs are baskets of securities that passively track stock-market indexes or financial indexes. Since ETFs mirror indexes, they don't have big management fees, nor do they generate as much trading volume (and commission costs) as actively managed mutual funds; when they do have portfolio turnover, it is often by swapping stocks instead of buying and selling them, which means they don't run up capital-gains taxes the way mutual funds often can. The result: lower overall costs for investors. The average annual fee for an ETF is 55 basis points (i.e., 0.55% of assets), significantly below...
Since most ETFs only mirror a market index, such as the S&P 500, they won't outperform the index. But increasingly, investors see that outperformance quest as more of a pipe dream. "Only 20% of [mutual-fund] portfolio managers actually beat the index that they're tracking," says John Spallanzani, director of ETF sales and strategy at GFI Group. "So if you put your money in an ETF, you're basically beating 80% of the mutual-fund managers out there." ETFs are also more liquid than mutual funds, because they can be bought, sold or shorted throughout the trading...
Advisers also warn investors to choose larger ETFs over smaller start-up ones, especially when it comes to global and emerging-market funds. Unlike mutual funds, investors face price spreads when buying and selling ETFs, and these spreads can be quite wide - spanning several percentage points in some cases - when the ETF is small or its underlying stocks don't trade much...