Comments on: ETF Deathwatch – March 2009

By: ichannel

ichannel — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:09:29 +0000

A look at ETF Trading Volumes and Total Assets…

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By: A look at ETF Trading Volumes and Total Assets | Canadian Capitalist

A look at ETF Trading Volumes and Total Assets | Canadian Capitalist — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:41:49 +0000

[...] Rowland, a money manager, maintains an ETF Deathwatch on the Invest with an Edge website. To qualify, an US-listed ETF must be at least 6 months old and [...]

By: samy cassis

samy cassis — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:42:31 +0000

please e-mail back with the most favourite ETFS that you think might be outperforming for the year 2009.
thank you

By: Ron Rowland

Ron Rowland — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:28:20 +0000

TC,

I calculate ADVT myself and it’s something you can problably easily do also. To arrive at the figure I first calculate the Value Traded (VT) each day (the daily closing price times the volume). Note, this calculation is an approximation but is close enough for this. A more accurate method requires looking at the price and volume of each trade during the day.

Once I have VT calculated for each day, I then sum them up for the calendar month (this gives us monthly VT), then I divide by the number of market days in the month to arrive at ADVT for the month.

You could also get a good approximation by just using a 21-day average of the daily VT since 21 days is the average number of trading days in a month.

By: TC

TC — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:39:32 +0000

Just wondering, where do you get the info about the “Avg Daily Value Traded” from? Just wanting to check out some ETF’s I own.

By: Paul Franc

Paul Franc — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:09:59 +0000

Ron if you want to do the investing public a favor please go to the macro shares web site and do a chart of their up and down oil fund’s combined NAV. You’ll see the funds have been losing money since day one. Yet the macro markets is still out there marketing this piece of **** as no counterparty risk.

By: Paul Franc

Paul Franc — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:07:12 +0000

The JohnM person above must come from macroshares: macroshares is the scam of the century – they not only deserve to be on the ETF deathwatch, the sponsor company macro market needs to be prosecuted for fraud. Every one of the (very few) holders of their macro shares I talked to is talking about filing a class action lawsuit:

I have the unfortunate experience of buying UOY right after their previous ones terminated, and ever since day one their fund is bleeding out of money. How is this happening? Check this out:

Their fund charges 0.95% annually PLUS (big PLUS) a $600k hidden “fixed annual fee”. Since their funds hold treasury which is yielding only 0.1%, their fund combined is bleeding out 0.85% annually. AND let’s add in the $600k (PER FUND if I forgot to mention), since their funds are not doing **** they have only $20m sitting in the up and down funds combined, the $1.2m annually adds up to an additional 5% in fees!

Now there you have it, you add up the NAV for both UOY and their down fund which in theory should always equal to $50 (teeter-totter), but in reality it’s been slowly declining since day 1. Now they only add up to $47.96 (pre-split level). These scammers are secretly taking money out of the fund every day and now 8 months since they started thing scam the funds have lost 10% of their value simply due to fees!! No hidden counterparty risk? LMAO.

So I suspect the real reason why they split those shares is to hide the effect of the ridiculous fee on their NAV (after split the dollar fee number per share is 1/4 of the original).

By: Ron Rowland

Ron Rowland — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:40:06 +0000

JohnM, I tend to agree with you that MacroShares are probably not ETFs. See my recent article on that subect.:

http://investwithanedge.com/are-macroshares-really-etfs

However, they are currently classified as such by most rating agencies. Since these are the only securities of this type (that I know of) in the U.S., it probably doesn’t make much sense to put them in a class by themselves. They are not ETFs, but they are not closed-end funds either.

What’s the point of having something track an index (Macroshares) if they don’t really track the index (premium/discount). Why involve the index at all? It just adds a layer of complexity, confusion, and misleading information.

By: JohnM

JohnM — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:11:21 +0000

while assets and trading volume of macroshares are low, they’re not ETFs – they are paired securities, so either side is not supposed to track the index (they are designed to trade at premiums and discounts). This isn’t really a flaw. If there’s a flaw, its applying this structure to an exposure (oil) that can be delivered in several other ways already. their inflation and housing filings are very interesting, these are exposures that an ETF can’t deliver (yet, anyway), so these macroshares will be worth watching closely