|
Page 6 of 20
On the other more speculative side of the markets, the ETFs trades very heavily. Real estate funds have huge ups and downs. The turnover of the iShares real estate ETF we looked at was 23,977%—to put precision on a number that doesn’t need to be precise.
Obviously, Financial SPDRS were attractive both to buyers and sellers last year, with 9,600% turnover. The NASDAQ QQQs? 8,700%. These are remarkable numbers, suggesting that a great deal of what’s going on in ETFs is a business of very rapid trading among large, institutional investors.
Now, when you look at more normal share turnover, over on the right side of the chart—we just took out of a group of about 38 or 40 funds, the lowest turnover funds. More than about half of them seemed to be Vanguard funds, which have turnover in the range of about 200% per year, far lower than those high percentages. So there is a use for ETFs that doesn’t require the trading that seems to show up in the less speculative part of the market.
How high is a 200% turnover rate? Well, the average mutual fund last year happened to have one of the highest turnover rates in a long time—a 33% redemption rate last year. That’s high, very high as far as I’m concerned. So you can imagine what I think of 200% turnover.
What we are seeing here is the use of funds, of ETFs, for speculation. For the bigger ones and for the more traditional ones, in some sense at least, we have much lower turnover, but still high compared to mutual fund turnover.
If we go to the next chart, we can try to answer the question on the next two charts. Okay, we know how ETFs do. But only in recent years have we found out how the investors in mutual funds do. You can actually calculate these returns, what we call the fund returns or the time-weighted return, or typical rate of return. Something starts at $10 and goes to $11―that’s 10%, not very complicated there. But then we do a dollar-weighted return, an asset-weighted return, to show how investor cash flows influence that return delivered by fund. The reality of life in this business is that it is very rare that investors do as well as the funds themselves.
And that is the point I’m making on this chart with the ETFs. These are all exchange-traded fund groups. You will be familiar with the groups: large-cap blend, large-cap growth and value, same in the mid-caps, European, emerging markets, and so on. And you will see that in general, investors lag those returns, just glancing at those numbers, by 5% or 6% a year of return. [That is, they earn] 5% or 6% less than the fund, than the ETF itself earns, showing that the trading is done in an unfortunate way in terms of timing.
The numbers shown over on the right side of this chart are unbelievably consistent. For example, on that page there are 46 ETFs, and in 40 cases out of 46, the investor returns lag the funds return. This is not an aberration. This is a very consistent return, which you will see again if we will flip over to the next chart, which just shows some additional subsectors of the market, in the ETF form, with the investor return and the investor lag.
|
RSS
