{"text":[[{"start":6.95,"text":"The writer is editor of TKer.co"}],[{"start":10.95,"text":"If you are an investor and want to make a trade that involves more than buying or selling a single stock, then you are not short of options. Let’s say you wanted to buy a basket of stocks exposed to the rise of artificial intelligence. There are some 35 US exchange traded funds tracking the theme. There are ETFs tracking all sorts of themes, including alternative energy, religious values, petcare, cannabis and memes."}],[{"start":41.15,"text":"Or if you sought exposure to a single stock, but wanted the position leveraged or layered with some kind of option, there are about 200 single-stock ETFs providing more sophisticated trades involving some of the most popular stocks."}],[{"start":56.9,"text":"Perhaps instead you’re a traditional passive investor seeking plain-vanilla exposure to the S&P 500 index. State Street’s SPDR S&P 500, the original US-listed ETF, gets you that. Vanguard and BlackRock offer nearly identical ETFs tracking the 500, but with a slightly lower expense ratio. Decisions, decisions."}],[{"start":83.72999999999999,"text":"There are now more ETFs listed in the US than there are individual stocks. According to Morningstar data reported by Bloomberg, 4,370 ETFs and 4,172 stocks currently trade on US exchanges. It’s an eye-catching milestone for the booming ETF industry, which boasts about $12tn in assets under management. But the milestone itself isn’t cause for alarm."}],[{"start":113.55999999999999,"text":"“Keep in mind there are still more mutual funds than ETFs,” says Todd Sohn, senior ETF strategist at Strategas. There are 6,471 unique US-domiciled mutual funds, according to Morningstar. "}],[{"start":129.6,"text":"In the same way that there are more recipes than there are ingredients, it seems inevitable that there would be more ETFs than there are individual stocks in those funds. The market has provided a lot of ingredients in the form of tradeable securities. But different investors will demand different recipes."}],[{"start":150.34,"text":"ETFs provide a low-cost and tax-efficient way to trade a basket of securities. Their invention was a big win for investors, who often see their net returns shrink the more they trade their portfolios. And there are all types of investors with varying investing goals and appetites for risk. There is no one-size-fits-all vehicle that addresses all of every investor’s needs."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":178.24,"text":"To be clear, just because an ETF exists doesn’t mean it will be appropriate for your portfolio. If you can’t stomach a lot of volatility, then maybe you shouldn’t be in leveraged ETFs. And having huge amount of choice is not necessarily a good thing."}],[{"start":196.53,"text":"Informed investors with very particular needs and the resources to sift through the growing mountain of ETFs can do very well for themselves. In practice, it can make a valuable investment vehicle increasingly intimidating and confusing."}],[{"start":215.18,"text":"“Choice overload is the primary con,” says Ben Johnson, head of client solutions at Morningstar. “Investors have too many choices.”"}],[{"start":225.63,"text":"It’s hard enough to understand the difference between one strategy and another. But it gets more complicated than that. “There can be multiple ETFs from different issuers all proposing to do the same trade or investment,” says Sohn. “Due diligence is unbelievably important in today’s ETF universe.”"}],[{"start":246.37,"text":"Two different funds could be offering the same strategy, but how they execute could differ, which in turn affects performance and costs."}],[{"start":256.27,"text":"“Adding more choice — especially and increasingly in the form of increasingly complex and costly products — is far more likely to benefit the issuer than the investors they’re nominally seeking to serve,” Johnson says."}],[{"start":270.84999999999997,"text":"This speaks to the irony of ETF costs. While ETFs offer a relatively low-cost way to trade certain strategies, that doesn’t mean you can’t find ETFs that offer high-cost strategies."}],[{"start":285.9,"text":"“It’s important to understand what the ETF is proposing to do . . . which assets it’s aiming to replicate, how it does so (for example, stocks vs. derivatives) when it rebalances, and costs involved,” says Sohn."}],[{"start":301.83,"text":"By the way, not all ETFs are successful. Plenty have come and gone due to a lack of interest. Unlike when a company goes bankrupt and sees its stock go to zero, when an ETF closes, investors get their money."}],[{"start":317.06,"text":"But there’s a catch. “Investors of the [closing] fund will either have to sell their shares or wait for the final distribution of the ETF,” Sohn explains. “Neither is great because it can result in a taxable gain.”"}],[{"start":332.66,"text":"So what started as a tax-efficient way of investing can lead to an untimely and unwanted tax bill. “As long as the underlying basket is liquid, any ETF is tradeable,” Sohn says. “But, if you have low volume AND low AUM [assets under management], that will scare away most investors because of closure risk.”"}],[{"start":353.95000000000005,"text":"While ETFs come with many benefits, they are not without risk. So as always, investors should do their homework before investing."}],[{"start":371.06,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftmailbox.cn/album/a_1756804718_5729.mp3"}