Tag Archives: thinly-traded etf

ETF News, People Profiles, Tech Talk

Bloomberg LP Touches ETF Hot Button: Where’s the Beef ?

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Bloomberg LP's Catherine Cowdery Feb 29 Interview w WallachBeth Capital's Andy McOrmond

For those gray-bearded former floor brokers who would gallop into an exchange specialist’s trading pit and shout, “I’ll buy what’s offered on the screen!”,  and were often dismayed when the specialist yelled back,  “Go ahead, trade with the screen..but I don’t have that offer anymore!”– you won’t be surprised to know that today’s “screen-based markets”, especially for the majority of ETF products, are not the panacea that electronic market promoters would have you believe.

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, if one expects the ‘screen’ to be displaying the real liquidity that’s available.

To underscore that point, we’ve excerpted 2 minutes from the Catherine Cowdery and Pimm Fox Feb 29, Bloomberg Radio 20-minute podcast interview with ETF market specialist Andy McOrmond, the co-head of ETF Trading for liquidity aggregator WallachBeth Capital.

Before you (or after) you click on the logo above, what the extracted clip doesn’t include are the following and particularly poignant points that McOrmond made in the interview when speaking to the topic of ETF market liquidity and transparency of trading screens. Continue reading →

ETF News, People Profiles, Tech Talk

ETF Transparency: Thinly-Traded Does Not Mean Illiquid-Says Leading ETF Issuer

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Unbeknownst to too many who traffic in ETFs, the phrases “thinly-traded” and “illiquid” are far from synonymous.

Yes, of the now 1300+ exchange-traded funds, 2/3 of the total ETF trading volume is attributed to the top 25 “go-go names.” But, whether you’re an RIA, a corporate treasurer, a hedge fund manager, or a pension fund administrator, if your investment and/or trading decisions are predicated on what the “screen” displays, you’re not only foregoing investment opportunities that your peers are benefiting from, but you’re likely in the wrong business.

That’s the take-away from a solid white paper produced by a group that would know: Emerging Global Advisors LLC, one of the leading issuers of emerging market ETF products.

It takes more than moxy for a firm that feeds products into the exchange-traded marketplace to observe that trading screens (which aggregate bids and offers scrapped from the assortment of regulated exchanges) are often less than transparent.

To drive this point home, the white paper’s leading shout out: “The Screen Market is Not the Market.”

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