In my recent piece on securities lending in and around ETFs, I rolled through a lot of data on both how ETFs are lending out their portfolio securities, as well as how they themselves are being lent.
Check out this Marketbeat post and the original story.
To find out how your ETF or mutual fund is participating in securities lending, just take a look at the fund’s income statement in its annual report.
A quick post at WSJ on single-stock tickers and crazy ETF words!
Bailout Greece.
Feel free to boo, hiss or add your own in the comments.
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Lots of it.
My story in today’s WSJ tries to get at a difficult point. Do brokers, and specifically discount brokers, owe it to themselves to protect their customer from themselves?
The proliferation of new ETF products - not just leveraged and inverse leveraged funds - have begun to make the world of ETFs look like open-end funds, closed-end funds and hedge funds all in one.
Several sources appropriately pointed out that ETFs are tradable, optionable and shortable, like stocks, and deserve to be regulated thusly. Others pointed out that you are outsourcing complex fund management to experts, but have to make no admission of actually understanding/reading the investment prospectus.
Some bloggers continue to wave the flag that these products should not get the greenlight because the initial marketing was out of sync. This seem to have been corrected by regulatory “hints” and updated marketing language and audience. Volume has similarly reduced since the summer of 2009.
But I believe that this story plays out more in the hands of brokers, who have to decide if it matters for their business to increase disclosure/information on fund construction. And for that, it may only take an act of codifying a standardized statement of information for ETFs to begin with.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
