Blown Away By ETF Conference

The World Series of Exchange Traded Funds was held this week in Miami.  This year there was standing room only for the opening session and the hotel had to add rows of chairs in the hallway outside the doors of the room.  It was a great conference and I was just about to dive into a summary, when I saw Richard Kang’s follow-up and didn’t think I could do a better job.  I’ll just highlight a few of the points he made:

• There is an exceptional amount of innovation being demonstrated in the ETF world;
• The pipeline for new ETF products is full and will most likely not slow down for some time;
• Retail advisors seem to be pretty well educated on ETF products and there is the need to figure out where the newer ETFs come into play for asset allocation;
• With more and more product, it’s getting harder to differentiate one from the next – sales and marketing is going to get tougher;
• Traditional style indexing is strong and will be for some time, alternatively weighted indexes are going to have a hard time catching up;
• The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) story is strong and volatility will test investors