Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are the real game-changers of financial products, whether you're just starting out or you've been playing the market for years. In our latest podcast episode, I sit down with Lawrence Carrel, a seasoned finance journalist and the author of ETFs for the Long Run. This episode is packed with golden nuggets for anyone looking to diversify their portfolio without breaking the bank on fees.
Larry has had a distinguished career as a finance journalist. His stint at the Wall Street Journal during the dot-com bubble gave him an insider's view on how digital tech reshaped media and finance.
We kick things off by diving into the history of ETFs, starting from their humble beginnings back in 1993. At first financial advisors were suspicious of the passive approach as well as the hit to their commissions. But now, they've become the darling of retail investors. Larry breaks down how ETFs are a wallet-friendly alternative to mutual funds, letting you trade shares throughout the day just like stocks.
We then unpack the key differences between ETFs and Mutual (and Managed) Funds. Larry points out the perks like lower fees and stock-like trading, but he's also straight-up about the risks, especially with thematic ETFs in areas like biotech or tech. They can skyrocket, but they're also exposed to riskier niches.
The chat also highlights how ETFs have made investing more democratic. Now, it's not just the big players who can get in on diverse investments; everyday folks like you and me can too. It's empowering, but with great power comes great responsibility to understand what you're getting into.
As we close out, Larry and I chat about our new project, the "ETFs for Beginners" podcast. We're all about making these financial tools less intimidating, explaining their history, and showing their true potential in today's market. It's all about empowering you with knowledge to make smarter investment moves.
Tune in to learn more about ETFs and the role they can play in your investment strategy.
TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Larry: But nowadays a lot of financial advisors and a lot of big firms use ETFs, uh, in the portfolio and that way they can get diversification. They can say, well, we'll buy a little bit of a biotechnology fund, we'll buy a little bit of an oil fund, we'll buy a little bit of a financial fund. And that way they can get that focus in what areas they want of asset allocation and. But they're using it, using ETFs a lot more than using mutual fund these days.
Phil: G'day, and welcome back to Shares for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. Today we're joined by Larry, an accomplished finance journalist and the author of ETFs for the long Run. Hello, Larry. How's it going?
Larry: I'm very good, Phil. How are you?
Phil: As I'm very well, thank you. And I just wanted to point out at this stage of the interview, before we even start, that because we're heading towards Christmas and or Hanukah, uh, we're going to have a relaxed and casual conversation today because we want to talk about us, our roles in the finance industry, and also about a new project that we're both quite excited about. So as more everyday investors turn to ETFs to build wealth and gain market exposure, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the options and strategies out there, which is what we're kind of addressing at the moment. So, uh, Larry, just tell us a bit about your background. Where did you come from, what's your education, and how did you end up as a finance journalist?
Larry: You want my education?
Phil: Yeah, why not? I can talk about mine as well.
Larry: I graduated Cornell University and I took a certificate program in journalism at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. And I started working in the movie industry. And after a while, that wasn't going very far. So I started working in newspapers and I worked in some local newspapers. And then to get into financial journalism, I got a job right when the Internet was really getting going and I got on the team that was building the wall streetjournal.com website. So I was right there at the beginning and I started writing for the website and I wrote about, you know, stocks and all kinds of finance stories, and I wrote about showing music on the web back when you were doing it over a modem. And it was very Scratchy and very jumpy. And I did that for about five years. And I got up to become the assistant international editor of the wall streetjournal.com. then I went to smartmoney.com where I. I wrote a column about hot stocks. And then I'd done that for five years. And they said, would you like to write about ETFs? I think they're gonna be big. And so I had no idea what they were. And this is about 2006. And I said, sure, you know, twist my arm. So I did it. And I was right there, right when ETF started exploding onto the scene. Not when ETF started, but when they. This is 2006, when they first really started. People started noticing them, the broader retail investor public. So, so I was covering them when, like, the gold ETF came out and the copper ETF came out and all these new things for commodities and a lot of the starting, the unique thematic ones. And I went to the street.com and I wrote about ETFs. And I've pretty much been writing about. And while I was there, I got a phone call from, you know, Wiley Publishers, and they said, would you like to write a book about ETFs? You're the only one on the web actually writing about these things. And I said, sure, twist my arm. So I started writing a book and it's the. This book right here, ETS for the Long Run and get a little nice picture.
Phil: Still available at all good bookstores.
Larry: Oh, uh, it's so available on Amazon. I don't know if it's so available at bookstores. They're pretty ruthless with, uh, moving stuff out. It's, you know's, a couple years old. So I wrote that book and I talked to all the people in the industry and I really became very well versed on ETFs. And then I wrote for them for an ETF Report, and I've written for them for Kiplingers and Investors Business Daily. And now I do some writing about ETSF for Forbes.
Phil: Wow, what a history. What did you do in the movie industry?
Larry: I was a production assistant. You know, glorified grunt, getting in the car to pick up props, stuff like that.
Phil: Yeah, magic. The magic of Hollywood, was it?
Larry: Yeah. Moving all the stuff the union guys wouldn't touch.
Phil: So that's, um, interesting that you were right there at the beginning of the Internet taking over from print journalism. How was it at the time? So I'm just interested in this because I come from a similar background, maybe not journalism but media production, and there was that time when the Internet appeared. The traditional media was like caught blinking
00:05:00
Phil: in the headlights because suddenly the rivers of gold were being taken away from them. What was it like at that particular time, and especially at the Wall Street Journal?
Larry: Well, the Wall Street Journal was definitely one of the smartest of the bunch. They started charging from day one and they were saying, we've got financial information, information that you can make Money off of, so you got to buy it. And, you know, that's become a trend among tons of people, all these financial, uh, media institutions. But you know, the regular newspapers, they would put their stuff on the web and it was cannibalizing their readers. And the thing was, why should I stick with, you know, the New York Times if I can get the same AP story from Seattle or same AP story from St. Louis? So, you know, everybody was printing the same stories about the same news. And so there wasn't much need for you to pay a subscription to a regular newspaper. You could find your stories pretty much somewhere else if you worked hard enough. And, you know, it was really the whole beginning of the transformation and the downfall of journalism, I think, and that so much media, so much information was around on the web at the time that, uh, the thing that was most important to the people who were trying this out, you know, a lot of people, publishers and editors are coming to the web and they're not really sure how it works, and they're learning as they go. And nobody really knew how it worked. So everybody was figuring it out at the same time. And, you know, newspapers, you go to the New York Times, you go to a magazine, you buy a full page ad, it's like $10,000. And magazine publishers could get away with it. They would say, well, you know, you got five people in the house and they're all taking a look at it. So you're getting five people for the price of this, or it's in a doctor's office and you're getting, you know, how many people, 40 people looking at this. So they could get away with charging these high fees. And then with the digital age, you can track every single person who looks at a website and you can, you know, get the eyeballs. That was the most important thing. Eyeballs, I guess'always been important, but now you could actually quantify the eyeballs. So they found out not as many people were. Well, a lot of people were not on the web yet, and not everybody had accepted it or moved over. But even so today you can see that not that many People are reading it as we're promised. In the old days when they were doing the big ads, so suddenly they couldn't charge as much. And now they can only charge based on what the numbers were. So if, you know, New York Times or say smart Money magazine was saying, you know, you're getting five readers, and we sold it 100 subscriptions, so that's 500 readers. Now when you go into the web and you look and you see we only got 100 readers. We didn't get 500 readers. We're only paying you for 100 people. Suddenly media is making less money. And other things that worked to destroy the media were like Craigslist, which was basically a free classified ads. And, you know, newspapers especially made easily 30% of the revenues from classified ads. So suddenly that was taken away from them. So, yeah, you know, it was very interesting being in the middle of the mailtorm. And, uh, that was a time when financial journalists were actually treated with respect, unlike today.
Phil: Is that the case?
Larry: Um, no, I think they still are. But definitely, you know, the stock market, because it was on the Web, CNBC was on. Right. But you had to be able to watch TV during your workday. But now you were on the Web, on a computer, on the Internet. You could check your stocks anytime during the day. You could actually trade while you were at. Or, you know, you could read about, you know, financial investments. So it became much more democratized and a lot more retail investors jumped in.
Phil: Democratized or dangerous in many cases, having that kind of access.
Larry: You know, people were always going to abuse the system. So in general, for most people, uh, it opened up investing as a possibility where it hadn't been before.
Phil: So, uh, staying in ancient history, because it's a long time ago, all this, it only feels like yesterday for both of us, I'm sure.
Larry: Yeah, close to 30 years ago. Yeah.
Phil: Yeah, that's right. But I guess that's when ETFs first came about. And let's talk about the context of ETFs in the mutual fund industry, or we call them in Australia, managed funds. But, um, this is where finance professionals would take a cut for managing your money. When did the first ETFs come out? What's your knowledge about that?
Larry: They first appeared in 1993, so they just had their 31st anniversary this year. You know, and for the longest time, the United States had two stock exchanges. New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange. And the New Yorkers were all the blue chips were the big established companies, and the American was Where, you know, companies first went public and, you know, young companies starting out and they would do that. And this went on, um, pretty much since most of the 1800s and all the 1900s until, you know, the 60s when the NASDAQ was created. And then the Nasdaq, it was small and it started over the counter. So they started taking on all these tech companies, and a lot of the tech startups went there.
00:10:00
Larry: And so now the NASDAQ was building into a bigger thing and started eating into the, uh, American Stock Exchanges lunch. It's called Amex, like, uh, the credit card, but not the same thing. So the American Stock Exchange was losing revenue to nasdaq, and they needed to find products they could sell that, you know, would help bring Money in. And so, you know, that's sort of how options got invented, was that somebody needed to make money. And so they created the options thing Anyways, ETFs were created out of thin air. And what had happened was in the 1987 crash in America of the stock exchange, the SEC, the securities exchange Commission, said, you know, we'd like a product that people could use to get out of stocks without having to actually, you know, sell individual stocks, which was creating more and more of a, um, vicious cysco, selling off more, enforcing the market to go lower. So what they wanted to do was they wanted people to have, like, a device, a product that they could sell, like one share for 500 shares. And so people were working on it for about, uh, I guess six years. And then finally the American Stock Exchange worked with, uh, a firm called State street, which still exists. And they came up with the idea. Well, you know, there had been a lot of iterations beforehand, but they all had certain kinks that made them unworkable. And the American Stock Exchange hired these two financial, quote, unquote, rocket scientists. And this guy named Nate Most, and he said he had been working as a commodities seller, like a palm oil. And he knew these things called warehouse receipts, where you would basically, you would put all the oil into the warehouse, and you would get a receipt saying you owned this oil. And that way the oil would be stored in another place, and you didn't have to worry about moving it around and this and that. You just. If you wanted to sell the oil, you just sold somebody the certificate or the receipt, and now they own the oil. And so he tried to do that with stocks, and he's like, if we can put stocks into, like, a clearinghouse place or like a holding center and then just sell a share of how Many stocks there were. We can, you know, you can move a lot of information, a lot of stocks without having to move the actual stocks. So what they did was they created the ETF and they were working with State street, which is out of Boston, and State Street Global Advisors and the uh, financial scientist and Nate Most and uh, was a guy named Stephen Bloom. And State street, they, you know, they spent many, many months figuring out how they could get it to work. And then they launched it and with the first one was called S and p. Sanard Poor's 500 registered depository receipt. So catch, catchy name, right? But they abbreviated it to SPDR and they called it the spider. So if you've ever heard of spiders on the market, that's what these are. They took the s and P 500 and they created the first ETF. And what it was was they would grab all 500 stocks, stocks from all 500 companies and put them into a package. And then they would say this is what's called a creation unit. And then they would sell the creation unit, which was basically a receipt for the 500 stocks. And that's what they would sell on the secondary market. And then they would just trade. The stocks wouldn't move, they would stay with the custodian, but the receipt, or the ETF share as it were, would be traded on the market. So people could get by the whole 500 index in one quick shot by just buying one share of the ETF. So for the longest time they were trying to, you know, sell it. But brokerage houses didn't like them because there was no real commission on them. And you know, mutual funds have a load on them. You know what a load is?
Phil: Like the management expense ratio or is it something different to that?
Larry: It's basically a mutual fund commission. It's different from the expense ratio. It's like a commission that you pay to the mutual fund right when you get it. And there are now many, many funds that are called no load funds. So you don't have to pay that commission upront. But in those days, the brokerage houses and the financial advisors were making serious money with these loads. They were like 4 to 5% of your investment. So if you had $100 and you gave it to a M mutual fund with a 5% load, the brokerage took 5% and you only invested $90. So right away you're taking a hit before you've even invested anything.
Phil: This is, I mean this is a real picture of the finance industry that they always find a way of clipping in the ticket. And that clip that they took, uh, in the past was much, much greater, especially mutual manage fund space. Yeah.
Larry: Now ETSF's can be, can pretty much only be bought by brokers. And you pay a commission, but
00:15:00
Larry: you know, you're not paying a 5% commission. And then if you could go to a discount broker, you pay even less. And so, you know, while the broker might have made it, the ETF company wasn't making a ton of money because they weren't getting the load. So they weren't really, brokerages weren't pushing these because they weren't making Money off of them. So the saying around the ETF industry is ETFs weren't sold, they were bought, which means people found out about them, um, and they realized that they liked them and they liked the idea of them and they started buying them and they started building up the retail investor base or institutional base of investors. And so they were saying, yeah, we like these things because of these benefits. So we're not going to buy the mutual funds anymore, we're going to buy these which are very similar. And then they came out a couple years later, they came out with one for the Dow Jones Industrial average. And then ETFs really broke onto the public consciousness in 1999, which was six years after the first one with the, uh, QQQs, the triple ques, which was the NASDAQ 100, which is an index of all the, of the top 100 stocks in the NASDAQ except the financials. So it was very concentrated on technology. And this was during the dot com boom in 1998, 1999. And so everybody wanted to buy technology. And most of those companies were on the Nasdaq and most of those companies were in the NASDAQ 100. And a way you could get a little bit of all those tech companies that were coming public, or Microsoft and Intel, you know, the ones that were big already or the ones that were starting out by the QQQs. And that's how that, you know, suddenly it was huge. It made tons of money, it was sponsored by nasdaq. And it really made a lot of, uh, money for them. And so, yeah, it was huge. And that's really how ETFs broke in. And then over the next couple of years, a couple of people, a couple of firms would come out with ETFs. But 2005 and 2006 people noticed that they started picking up more of a momentum, um, behind them. And you know, firms started Saying, oh, you know, these are. This is an interesting way. There's an interesting wraper, a vehicle that we can put stocks in. We wrap them up in this wrapper and it's a lot easier. So basically what the ETF is, it's a mutual fund that trades like a stock.
Phil: Well, that's job. That's our job here. Done. I think. Yeah, I think that's great. We just don't even need to explain anything else about ETFs. We can close the interview now. Thank you very much, Larry. It's been great. No, no, only joking, only joking. Sorry. There's so much to unpack there. I mean, I've never heard that story about how they first. The origin story I always thought of, you know, because you always hear the idea that Jack Bogle was the inventor of ETFs, which is not the case, obviously. So it actually came out.
Larry: JJ. Bogle hated ETFs.
Phil: I know he hated them, didn't he? And, uh, he was more looking at an index fund which was still in the mutual managed fund context, wasn't he?
Larry: Yes. And if you buy the book, I have this whole history in there and I talk about how the index fund was created.
Phil: And so an index fund is basically a mutual fund, isn't it? It's not an etf.
Larry: Yes, these were all mutual funds. And Jack Bogle was started Vanguard Funds and somebody else had created the index fund. One of these, um, private firms doing it for institutional investors. I think it was, well, as Fargo, and they created the index fund. And Bogo saw this idea and he said, you know what? This is a fantastic invention for retail investors. Because the mutual fund is you buy a share and you get an entire portfolio with that one share, and you buy whatever stocks are in that. Now, they started out with indexes, and the first index again was the s and P500. Because that a way to pretty much get the market. You know, you weren't specializing, you were. If the market went up that day, you went up. Because, you know, you read the numbers on TV or you read them in the paper. The Dow went up today, The S and P went up today. So a good way to know if you're making Money is if the Dow went up or the S and P went up, you made Money that day. And if the Dow falls or the S and P falls, you lost Money that day. So they picked what was the most popular index that had, you know, wide diversification, because the Dow Jones Industrial average is only 30 stocks, and the S&P 500 obviously, is 500 stocks. So it was a much broader diversified portfolio, which ironically, they pretty much move in tandem. Um, but still you were getting a more diversified portfolio. And so Bogo saw this idea and he decided to create the first index fund for retail investors. And it was the s and P500. And that became the flagship fund for Vanguard. And what the index fund is, is it of course follows the index and it buys every stock in the index so that you're getting
00:20:00
Larry: a true approximation of what the index is going up and down. Because you have to remember that the index is merely a mathematical construct. You can't invest in the index, you know, so the index tracks stocks. We gives them a waing and through that every day, it measures how far up and down the market goes. It's basically a thermometer for the stock market. It's measuring the market's health. So what a mutual fund does is you're turning that index into a portfolio. You've already got the list of stocks that's been created by the index company. And you go in and you buy those stocks. And then you can get the weightings. They tell you the weightings on each of these stocks. So you measure them, you get the weightings correct for each of these stocks, and then you package it together into a fund. So now you got 500 stocks into a fund and you sell shares of it to investors, institutional investors buy them, but also retail investors. And it became an easy way for retail investors to buy the market and not take on a lot of risk. That way I didn't have to personally go out and buy one stock of each of those 500 companies, which or hundred shares of those 500 companies, which of course costs a lot more money. And you know, then I'mnna pay a lot commissions on all 500 of those purchases. So that's go goingna cost me a lot of money as an individual investor. So here I was getting a package. All I had to do was invest $3,000 and I could buy shares however much the shares were, if they were dollar so and you know, what was that? 60 shares of stock. 60 shares of the fund. So you would be buying shares in the fund, and you had one portfolio manager who watched the fund, he bought the stocks and then you paid him, you paid him one fee. And you didn't necessarily need a financial advis, you could just buy the mutual fund and then go with that. So that's how the index fund really got going. And that was in the early 70s. And then when The ETSF came out. They also were founded with the S&P 500 as the first one. And you know, they. Later, we'll talk about this later. They've come to measure every little niche section of the market. And Bogle said, because these trade on the market. Whereas another big difference between ETFs and mutual funds is how they trade. Now, ETF stands for exchange Traded Fund. So that means theseither funds that trade on the exchange, obviously. And what that means is mutual funds don't trade on the stock market. Mutual funds, you have to buy them during the day when the market is open, but you don't know what price you're getting. So you have to wait t to the end of the day when they've calculated all the prices and all the weightings and then they come up with a price and that's what they give you. Because you got to remember, mutual funds were invented in 1940 and underneath the Investment act of 1940 in the SEC. So and they set out all these rules and back in those days, I mean, they had adding machines but they didn't have computers. And so they would have to wait till the end of the day to take the price of every stock, multiply it, by the way, they add them all up and divide by the number of shares and that's what the share price was. So it was an intensive mathematical thing that had to be done at the end of the day. Now, with the ETFs, with computers, they can figure out the price every 15 seconds. So you see the market'surging big news markets rallying. And you get in at 10 o'clock in the morning and you want to buy some shares. You buy shares of an etf, they trade like a stock. You go to your stock broker, buy like 100 shares, and then they're bought with within like the next five minutes. And so, or instantaneously, most times five nanoseconds, really. Yeah, right. But they're both as quickly as you buy a stock. And so you get that price at 10 o'clock in the morning, which say it's $100. Now, if you go and you call up your mutual fund company and you say, I want to buy 100 shares, they go, great, send us the money. So you send them the money, or you have to have money with them already, basically, they then wait till the end of the day because they have to add up all the stocks. And if the market surges from like 100 to 150, $150 on the index you know, you as the ETF owner get that whole dollar profit, but you as the mutual fund owner don't get that profit because you bought it at the highest price at the end of the day. And the same goes for when the market's crashing. If you own the ETF and you get out at 10, it's 150 and you see it falling. You get out of 10, you get that $150 price. And then if it falls down to 100, you saved yourself that $50. And so you're able to make money by doing that. And with the mutual fund you sell at 10 o'clock in the morning, when it's 150 and the index closes at 100, you don't get any of that 50 in your sale. None of that money goes to you. It's lost to the market. You got the last price of the day. So that's how mutual funds work. And in
00:25:00
Larry: the crash of 1999, a lot of investors realized that suddenly these mutual funds were not getting out till the end of the day and that they were losing Money by when they sold them. So that's pretty much a big difference there between the two of them.
Phil: And another big difference is that mutual funds are often marketed as being, as having a team of experts behind them who know how to pick exactly the right stocks to generate returns that will outperform the market. But it might be worthwhile noting here about speiva. I can't remember what that stands for.
Larry: USUSE and P index, uh, versus our active funds.
Phil: Yeah. And now, so there's the idea that you can actively choose stocks which are going to give you a fund which will outperform the market versus just a passive investment in whatever the index is showing on that particular day.
Larry: Right?
Phil: Yeah, but now you can get ETFs that are, uh, active and passive as well. Just speak to a little bit about the difference between those two approaches.
Larry: Well, passive index fund investing is passive because the portfolio manager isn't buying and selling stocks all the time. Active management, they're allowed to buy and sell what they want whenever they want. They can trade in and out of a stock during the daytime and they can get buy like a stock in the morning and sell it at night. So they can do whatever they want in terms of trading and buying and purchases and passive funds. You get the list of stocks from the index provider and you have to hold those to approximate the actual index.
Phil: And, and presumably there's a lot less management involved, a lot less costs involved. Yeah, it's really just everything works pretty much automatically. Whereas you've got these rockstar, ah, fund managers who are trying to outperform the market or market themselves as having a history of outperforming the market.
Larry: So yeah, active managers can buy and sell. And most active managers having a mandate to beat the index that they're, you know, competing, that they use as their benchmark.
Phil: The benchmark, yeah, that's, that's the word, the term that we often hear outperforming the benchmark.
Larry: Right. And The S&P 500 is one of the big benchmarks of the US stock market and Dow Jones is another benchmark. And so if they follow any other smaller indexes, say like the Russell 2000 or anything that's really small, that's the benchmark that they're measured against because the index is supposed to really capture that particular niche of the market. So every large cap stock fund, whether it be mutual funds or ETFs, is measured against the benchmark, which is the s and P500. And then the active managers, their mandate is to beat the s and P500. So you're buying somebody who's smarter than the market and can buy the right stocks and knows how to get out of him, take profits when he has to and sell before he lose as much and he should make more money than the index. And you know, people can do that one or two, maybe three years in a row, but it's very hard to do that consistently. And to do that, the S and P is an accumulation of the entire market, of the entire amount of people that are in the US Stock market buying and selling. This determines everybody's action. So you're saying, I'm smarter than the market. And you know, at a certain point, even if you are smarter than the market, now you've got a fund that is charging a 1.5% expense ratio in addition to like, say the index is 4,000 and you move up to like 4,010. So you beat it. But then you've got all these expenses that are hurting the returns. You got to worry about the expense ratios. If that's 1.5%, you got to subtract that from the return and everything else. All the expenses have to be subtracted and the loads and whatnot. So not only do you have to beat the index, you have to beat the index plus your fees for it to be profitable for your investors, which is a very hard thing to do and which is going to, you know, you have to beat the index like 2 to 3% in order to cover all those fees. And so active managers are sort of at a loss. And yes, the Spivot thing, the S And P index versus active scorecard measures index funds versus active funds every year. And usually 80% of the active managers do not beat the index. So the index beats 80% of the active managers. So the odds are you can just buy the index and get the market and just, you know, you get the return of the market, you're not beating it. But so if the market goes up, you do well. And they used to sell this, people in active fund say, well, you're buying mediocrity, you're buying, you know, just the base market. We're going to give you a much better return. But the fact is they often don't give you a much better return. And so that's. Whereas passive, they save Money. They charge a lot less of an expense ratio because they don't have to pay for research. They don't research their stocks because they get the list from the index provider. They don't have to do
00:30:00
Larry: a lot of buying and selling. They don't have to pay the commissions, those purchases every time that the active manager wants to buy and sell and all the expenses that are in a mutual fund. There's a lot of expenses in a mutual fund, which I can list for you in a minute. But basically you take all those out and you can charge a lot smaller expense ratio for the etf, which is basically the management fee that you're paying the guy to run. You know, he's got to make money running the fund. So this is the fee you're paying him to run the fund. And ETFs don't have to pay a lot of these mutual fund costs, so they can bring that expense ratio down a lot.
Phil: It's interesting though, to reflect that the money that's invested via, say pension funds or 401k is in the States or superannuation as we call it here in Australia. They still use the vehicles of managed funds in most cases, don't they? So, um, there's kind of like this, this backdrop of money that's being managed by the finance industry, by Wall street or wherever around the world. That is still managing to clip the ticket quite effectively, isn't it?
Larry: Yeah, I mean, you have like a financial advisor or wealth manager. They're going to take, you know, anywhere from half a percent to a full percent off your returns as their payment. And this is better than commissions because they make more money. If you make more money so it's their incentive to make more money for.
Phil: You as opposed to in the past when there be commissions on sales of.
Larry: These products to person turn your account buying and selling stuff, Buying and selling stuff and you'd be paying huge commissions and you wouldn't see much in a return but they would be, you know, pocketing a lot of your commission Money. But nowadays a lot of financial advisors and a lot of big firms use ETFs in the portfolios and that way they can get diversification. They can say well we'll buy a little bit of a biotechnology fund, we'll buy a little bit of an oil fund or buy a little bit of a financial fund. And that way they can get that focus in what areas they want of asset allocation and that what they're using it using ETFs a lot more than, than using mutual funds these days.
Phil: Super is one of the most important investments you'll ever make. But how do you know if you're in the best fund for your situation? Head to lifeshera.com.au to find out more. Life Sherpa, uh, Australia's most affordable online financial advice. And that's now getting to the point that what started out as a very simple kind of product where you just looked at an index, now there's a panoply, a plethora of different kinds of funds which are going to be investing in all kinds of niches. Tell us about that process and you know, the advantages and some of the dangers involved.
Larry: Sure, I'd love to. Do you want me to go back and tell you all the fees the mutual funds have that ETFs don't have?
Phil: Oh, of course. Sorry I jumped in there, didn't I jumped the gun. So please, yeah, tell us about those, those fees.
Larry: These are the fees that mutual funds have that ETFs don't have. Of course we spoke about the load which is a commission you would pay your broker immediately once you give them the money. Higher expense ratios which I just explained because they do research and the managers are giving themselves a large fee and all the other things transaction costs. Now in America we have these things called 12B1 fees and what they are is they're added on at the into the expense ratio and this is like an extra fee to help market the fund. Either market to financial advisors or individuals on tv, whatever. There's an extra fee they can charge you to sell their own funds and then they have operating expenses.
Phil: Sorry, just explain that to me again. So they will be charging the Investor a fee to help them market their own fund.
Larry: It seems astonish it somewhere.
Phil: That's right. Someone's got to pay it and that's not going to be them out of their own pockets and their yachts in, in the harbor.
Larry: Right. And um, it's usually about 25 basis points which is a quarter of a percentage point. So they add that into the expense ratio and so you typically, I mean at the time I wrote that's and that's more.
Phil: And that's more than some ATF's charge for the whole of that investment.
Larry: Exactly. Yes. And then if you have your fund in like a 401 plan, which is a retirement plan in the United States, they add you know, fees onto that where you're limited if you like want to buy an S&P 500 mutual fund and whereas Vanguard might have a ah, low expense ratio because they're owned by their own investors. So they might have when it's down there, 10 or 15 basis points. I don't know exactly. But if you have your Morgan Stanley and you're with a 401k provider and you are you know, giving people at a company a list of stocks and funds they can buy
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Larry: and they are locked in with those funds, they can't go out of the 401 to buy what they want. Mu, you know a firm like uh, a Morgan Stanley or a JP Morgan or a Merrill lynch, they're going to sell their own funds and now you have an S&P 500 fund and they're charging a buck 50 for that. Like um, 1.5% for every $10,000. And they're making a lot of money off of that. Whereas you know, you go out and you buy a no load fund out on, out on the street and you can get that for about 30 basis points. And if you buy the Spyider, which is the ETF for the S&P 500 you're paying 9 basis points. So you're paying.09% of the assets in the fund for your fee and um, it's pretty cheap.
Phil: And that's going to cover everything. That's going to cover everything for the fund manager, including their own marketing costs, everything else. That's it. There's nothing else, is there?
Larry: Well, Brokege and the mutual fund now they have expense operating expenses, they have an administrator, they have a transfer agent, they have a distributor and they have to pay capital gains taxes. Well they don't pay capital. You pay the capital gains taxes when they buy and sell and. But a transfer Agent takes your shares and measures the shares, takes how much money you, determines how many shares you get for that amount of money. And then has to go to the mutual fund and say, okay, buy this many shares for Phil's account. And you know, then they do that. And then the administrator has to make sure it's all run well. This is in addition to the portfolio manager who'buying uh, the actually buying the shares of stock and making sure that the weightings are right. So they have these extra layers that are not in the ETF just by the mere function of how they are created in their structure. So mutual funds are a very hard time getting rid of these funds. They can cut them, they can cut them lower, but it's very hard to get very low to get below 1% with a mutual fund. Whereas ETFs. I think the average expense ratio on a mutual fund in America is 1%. Whereas the average expense ratio, which is 100 basis points, the average ratio on an ETF is about 40 basis points, you know, 0.4%. So you're saving a lot of money on fees. And the big thing to remember is you can't guarantee returns, but you can always guarantee fees and what you're going to pay. And to lower those fees is a good way to keep more money in your pocket.
Phil: And those costs compound as well. People don't realize that costs, uh, like gains compound as well over a period of time.
Larry: Right. So I'm sorry, but I forgot what the question was you were going into.
Phil: Oh, that's okay. No worries. Like I said, we're having a casual chat here. So we were talking about the difference between broad based index ETFs as opposed to the niches that are available now. And you know, you can get an incredible array of investment options in all kinds of sectors in the market. How do you see that and the development of it and whether there's any dangers involved as well?
Larry: Well, you have to remember the ETF is merely the rapper, okay? It holds individual stocks. And those individual stocks are as risky as they are on the actual stock market. So you know, you buy the s and P500, you buy the Spider, you're getting all 500 shares of that. And but there are many, many sectors of the market. There's the Russ of 2000 which covers the small cap stocks market. And there's one that's a total market fund that owns every single stock in the US stock market, no matter what size it is. Then you can, you know, specialize. There's one called the select sector spiders in which they broke the S and P into industry groups. And so you have like eight of those just S. Technology, energy, healthcare, consumer goods, financials. I don't remember them all, but you get the point. You can just buy the financials of the S and P. And there are other financial ETFs. Some are like what we buy financials that are not in the S and P, where we buy the financials that are, you know, less than a billion dollars. And okay, we're buying regional banks, we're buying, you know, other kind of financial stocks. We're buying insurance companies. And so you can specialize, you can break down, and you can get an ETF that is so specialized, it just owns one sector of an industry. So you can get NASDAQ 100, which has a lot of technology, where you can get one that is based on the US Semiconductor index and that only owns semiconductor companies. And then you can buy, you know, social media index, which only owns social media companies. So, but, you know, they have all kinds of things like biotechnology. Like, normally biotechnology is a risky sector, but you know that going in, or you should know that going in, it's much riskier than the large caps. So you can say, I really think biotechnology is growing. I want to get in. And you buy the biotechnology fund. So that's a riskier bet than the s and P500. By the fewer stocks
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Larry: you have in the fund, the less diversification you have and hence the riskier it is.
Phil: And those, one of those biotech stocks can suddenly, you know, Rocket 300, 3,000%, whatever because of some breakthrough drug or breakthrough device, whatever it is. Yeah.
Larry: See, now if you were, you know, you think biotechnology is going to break out, and you say, well, I'm gonna place my bet on Amgen, which is an American biotech company, and say Amgen has an earnings mistake and they've got to like, you know, go to the SEC and declare this problem. And so their stock takes a big hit when they come out with that news. But if you own the ETF fund, you get rid of what's called single stock etf. That ETF fund is redundant. If you get the etf, you get rid of what's called single stock risk, which means you.
Phil: Single. Single stock shock. I've heard it called as well.
Larry: Well, the shock comes after you take the risk. And you know, so you're risking that Amgen is going to do well. But Amgen takes a hit and you lose Money. But if you buy the biotechnology index, you're Getting a whole bunch of biotechs and that way you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. And Amgen is probably in the index. So if it takes a hit, you know, it might bring the index down a very small amount. But if the other biotechs are doing well, they might offset that and actually go up that day. So you pick the right industry, you just pick the wrong company. And by doing the etf, you eliminate that single stock risk. And of course you know your gains are not going to be as high when Mgen, like discovers the cure for Alzheimer's and goes to the moon, or you know, Lilly discovers the cure to weight loss and goes to the moon.
Phil: You know, you, um, we all remember the fires, Risr.
Larry: Yeah. So you miss that on the huge gain, but you're taking less risk and you still capture some of that gain by owning the fund because you realize that the drug industry or the pharmaceuticals or the biotechs are going to do a lot to try to solve this problem. But you don't know which company is going to succeed. And so by buying that, you spread out your risk. But it's so a risky ETF compared to the S&P 500.
Phil: Yeah, it's like putting together a portfolio of stocks and it becomes like that anyway. And it's like what Jack Begle was warning about and that they become tradable devices rather than something that's for long term investing.
Larry: That was Bogo's big problem with ETSF's. Well, you could trade them during the day, you could buy it in the morning and you could sell it at night. And he thought that that would just encourage more trading by retail investors. And every time you trade you have to pay a commission. So you're paying, you know, fees every time you invest. And even if you're building a return, those commissions can really cut into your returns. And he was very much into buy and hold by the index. America is getting better. The index is going higher. You don't need to trade it, just buy it and hold it and save on all those commissions. And he was afraid that people were going to go crazy trading funds if, um, you know, because of the ETFs made it easier to trade during the day. And he was right, but it didn't necessarily destroy people. But he was definitely right about the trading. A lot of trading goes on during the day with the ETFs. And that's why he didn't like them, because he thought they were very risky for retail investors.
Phil: It's becoming Obvious that we've got a lot of information to share and a lot to talk about, which is why we're going to be creating the ETFs for beginners podcast. Larry, you and I, just a bit of history. We met maybe three years ago, four years ago, virtually at fincon, which is a conference for financial podcasters, journalists, vloggers, bloggers, whatever.
Larry: Um, financial content?
Phil: Yeah, financial content. And that was really interesting because what actually attracted me to you in the first place was there was all these shiny, bright, happy bloggers and vloggers, and there was Grumpy Larry in the middle going, what? Affiliate marketing? What's in it for me?
Larry: Yah, what.
Phil: What are your memories of that?
Larry: Well, basically it was. It, you know, it was online, it was during COVID and we had to do it via Zoom. And you know, you would have classes, but I found it to be, you know, as all. Like, if you had a party on Zoom, you know, you couldn't talk to very many people and it wasn't great for networking, even though you were meeting people and. But you could attend these classes online and that was easy. And you do it from home and you don't have to worry about traveling and risk getting sick. So that was a good thing. And it saved a lot of money. They couldn't charge too much because you were sitting at home. And I think the first one was like free, wasn't it?
Phil: Yeah, I think it was, yeah, the very first one.
Larry: And then they did, um, well, no, the first virtual one, and then they did another virtual one, which they did charge for. And that one I found to be a lot more difficult because it was much harder to talk to the brands that were trying to look for people to help them. But it's back to being in real person to person now. Uh, in person kind of a conference. And yeah, it's a great place to meet people producing financial
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Larry: content, be they podcaster such as yourself, or writers such as myself, or doing blogs or doing whatever, you know, YouTube videos, all kinds of things.
Phil: Yeah, well, it's interesting that it's sort of brought us together from, you know, opposite ends of the planet. And we're now going to be working on this project, ETFs for beginners. And uh, I think it's worthwhile. I don't know, there's. There's many of these kind of financial content producers and providers that are going to try and tell you what to do. Whereas the way I feel about things is when we're talking about stories of like, about the history of ETFs, how they first came about. You end up with a bit of a deeper, uh, understanding. Well, that's what I hope for, anyway, and that's what I'm hoping that we can provide here.
Larry: I hope so, too.
Phil: You like questions. You like to have questions to answer, don't you?
Larry: Well, I mean, I agree with you, so I hope so'do. It. Uh, I feel like I've been monopolizing this conversation, and it's o you have.
Phil: You've got so much more knowledge than.
Larry: I have, so I'm trying to make my answ with a tiny bit shorter if I can.
Phil: Larry, that's great. So, uh, we'll be talking again very soon, and we'll be putting together a few episodes where we're going to cover the basics of each. And as I say, I think when this episode is released, we're going to be a week or so out from Christmas, Hanukkah. Anything else? Any other. Whatever Religion rocks your boat. So, Larry, thank you very much for joining me today.
Larry: My pleasure, Phil. And have we promoted, uh, the new podcast well enough?
Phil: I'm not sure. Just show us your book again, just for one more promotional opportunity, if anyone's still listening at this stage.
Larry: Well, here's the book, which is the first book with the history of the industry. And I, uh, explain all the differences between mutual funds and ETFs, and how a lot of the stuff we talked about today. What are the main benefits of ETFs, which we did not talk about today. And it has a couple of portfolios you can build and you can read what my projections for the industry were. And since this book was written a while ago, you can see how good it was on my predictions. And, um, yeah, so stay tuned. We're going to try to create a new podcast focus entirely on ETFs.
Phil: Uh, great, Larry, thanks very much.
Larry: Thank you.
Phil: Thanks for listening to Shares for Beginners. You can find more at sharesforbeginners.com. if you enjoy listening, please take a moment to rate or review in your podcast player or tell a friend who might want to learn more about investing for their future.
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