In a few days, the Exchange conference will kick off and several hundred advisors will meet in Miami to connect with one another, learn best practices from peers, and hear from ETF industry experts from BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street Global Advisors and elsewhere. But before the main festivities begin on Monday, the smart advisors will obtain continuing education credit by hopefully enjoying two hours of an ETF University session that I’m hosting.
When the VettaFi content team asked me to put the session together, I was excited. This was the chance to make sure advisors heard from some of the best and brightest in the ETF industry who are not working for an asset manager. There will be plenty of time for that on Monday and Tuesday, but on Sunday we will bring together some of the bright minds from Bloomberg, CFRA, ETF Think Tank, Factset, and Jane Street as well as ETF Strategists.
My colleague, fellow VettaFi Voice, and our editor in chief Lara Crigger will help me get the block of content started, recapping the records achieved in the ETF industry in 2022; the tools VettaFi offers to help sort through the 3,000 funds and counting universe; and what types of funds advisors were searching for most on our platform. Lara and I are proud members of this ETF nerd community.
From here, Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence; Elisabeth Kashner, director of Global Fund Research and Analytics at Factset; and Aniket Ullal, head of ETF Data & Analytics at CFRA, will spend time walking advisors through their unique due diligence process. Then they will be joined by Nate Geraci, President of the ETF Store, who will lead an interactive discussion about three of the more popular ETFs in 2022. I can’t tell you which ones, but they are not the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), which just turned 30 years old. Attendees will get to hear three likely-different views on the same ETF, helping them understand the risks and reward potential.
Then Ugo Egbunike, a fixed income specialist at Jane Street, will provide best-practices guidance on how to trade ETFs. Because, advisors that have long used mutual funds will realize, there is a right and a wrong way to trade an ETF.
Finally, Cinthia Murphy, director of research at ETF Think Tank, will lead an ETF practitoners panel with John Davi, founder, CEO and CIO of Astoria Portfolio Advisors; Lisa Kirschner, director of research at Richard Bernstein Advisors; and Shana Orczyk Sissel, President and CEO of Banrion Capital Management. While Eric, Elisabeth, Aniket, and even Lara and I have strong, informed opinions about ETFs, we are not managing money for clients and do not have the same degree of appreciation of the operational benefits ETFs can provide.
This probably sounds like an ambitious agenda for two hours, but my friends within the ETF nerd community are bringing their A game. I hope to see you at Exchange and at the ETF University session. If you are there and are inclined to take a selfie with me, post it to Linkedin tagging me and using #exchangeMiami; for each selfie, I will make a $5 donation to the Susan G Komen More than Pink Walk on Tuesday morning at the conference to help fight breast cancer.
To learn more about Exchange and register, please visit the Exchange website.
For more news, information, and analysis, visit VettaFi | ETF Trends.