Word: stockly
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...country's largest companies is still dominated by a relatively small number of men. A December review by Ernst & Young, for example, found that a mere 98 people control 43% of the voting power on the boards of the 40 companies comprising France's leading CAC 40 stock index. Not only that, but this dominant corporate core is nearly 80% French - a lopsided percentage, given that nearly 40% of the capital in those businesses is owned by foreign investors. And suggesting that the glass ceiling is still very much intact, the number of seats held by women...
Retail investors may still be cool to the stock market, keeping much of their savings in cash equivalents, but they are warmly embracing a relatively new investing tool - exchange-traded funds, or ETFs - hoping to find growth in a ho-hum market and keep costs down...
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...
...actively managed mutual funds. "It's clearly a category that's attracting more interest among ETF providers and mutual-fund companies," says Standard & Poor's Tom Graves. "It combines the characteristics of a passive, index-based ETF with that of an actively managed mutual fund." (See pictures of the stock-market crash...
...even bigger concern is that active ETFs must disclose their holdings daily rather than quarterly as mutual funds do. Although this makes the ETF more transparent, it also opens up the ETF to the risk that savvy hedge funds and others may snap up shares in a stock that an ETF is known to be moving into. This practice, known as front-running, could drive up the stock price and thereby dull the ETF's performance...