Judging by the crowds and the questions at the 5^th Annual Inside ETFs conference this week, it’s clear the exchange-traded fund industry is still gathering steam.

Apart from the more than 1,200 financial advisors and industry professionals who descended on the Westin Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Fla. to take part in the Jan. 23-24 event, what really caught my attention was the live ETF trading demonstration led by Matt Hougan and Dave Nadig.

The live-trading event was introduced last year and, while it’s a work in progress, it’s clear from the bigger crowd this year that advisors are coming to grips with the fact that trading ETFs isn’t the same as trading stocks.

A good price is not the same as the “best price”—the latter suggesting advisors and investors have done their due diligence, and are shopping around among market-makers to take measure of what buyers as well as sellers are serving up.

It’s akin to shopping for a car, is the way Andy McOrmond, a market-maker at WallachBeth, put it during the 90-minute seminar. Who’d buy a car without checking out what the “Toyota dealer down the street” is selling before closing any deal? Only someone dying for a bad one. It was simple, pithy advice.

ETF trading is all about realizing that it’s a two-way market with buyers and sellers in the traffic and, to hear McOrmond describe it, always trying to best each other to eke out a profit from each transaction. So, it’s important to know what the bid/ask spread is before jumping in and showing your hand.

Sure, it’s an extra layer of tasking for financial advisors acting on behalf of clients. But being on the wrong side of a wide bid/ask spread on an ETF—as a buyer or a seller—is a great way to be nickel-and-dimed out of investment returns, especially for investors who shift allocations or rebalance frequently.

The whole seminar amounted to an intensive and creative educational effort—precisely the sort of thing people in the ETF industry have been saying is so important as the exchange-traded fund moves increasingly into the investing public’s consciousness.

While some of the audience questions during that trading demonstration clearly suggested growing sophistication among advisors, there was talk on the conference’s sidelines that some of the discussion in the nearly three dozen panels went far above the heads of at least a few who attended.

That just means that educational efforts have to be ongoing—and even repetitive—if they’re going to be successful. With the assets pouring in—now totaling a near-record $1.133 trillion, by our latest count—and increasingly at the expense of the mutual fund industry, the stakes are becoming higher.

So, to the ETF industry, I’ll apply an expression the French cart out when they’re faced with a tough task: “There’s bread on the cutting board,” people!