The summer is typically quiet time for Wall Street, but not in the fast-moving ETF marketplace.
Never mind that a Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF is on the verge of being launched, the adoption rate of ETFs among financial advisors is through the roof.
"We predict annual growth rates of 15%-30% around the globe over the next five years and believe the ETF industry could surpass the hedge fund industry in assets under management during the next 12–18 months," said EY in its 2014 ETF Global Survey.
ThinkAdvisor's upcoming virtual workshop "ETFs: From Alpha to Omega and Everything in Between" on Thursday, July 24, covers the pulse of the ETF market and is the summer event that no advisor can afford to miss.
The keynote speaker, Robert Arnott, chairman and chief executive officer at Research Affiliates, will discuss the utility of alternatively weighted indexes in "What's Smart About Smart Beta? How Useful are Alternative Weighted Index Strategies."
Although the concept of "smart beta" indexes is still controversial, advisors should be fully versed to answer client questions about this topic. According to 2014 ETF Investor Study by Charles Schwab, 39% of surveyed investors want to learn more about strategic beta products that use fundamental or equal weightings and minimize market volatility. Among this same group of people, eight out of 10 want to know how to deploy these types of ETFs inside their portfolios.
Active ETFs are seen as one of the industry's most promising developments, and "Hyperactive? Actively Managed ETFs Continue their Breakneck Growth" will delve into the product pipeline and very latest with Noah Hamman, CEO of AdvisorShares, and Larry Steinberg of Financial Architects.
At the end of June, there was $16.21 billion invested across 89 actively managed ETFs, according to AdvisorShares.
ETFs that attempt to double or triple their daily performance long or short have been the beneficiaries of uncharacteristically low stock market volatility and in some cases have actually enjoyed returns that beat their underlying indexes.
