Читать книгу The Institutional ETF Toolbox - Balchunas Eric - Страница 12

Transparency is a value that many people hold dear in all aspects of life. We like transparency in our government (even though it is rare), our relationships, our community, and our business. So it is not a shocker that it is a valued trait of ETFs. ETFs are considered transparent because almost all of them report their holdings every day. This is an advantage that is best contrasted to mutual funds, which only report holdings quarterly and with a 60-day delay, and hedge funds, which never report the holdings of their funds.

Knowing what is in your ETF can come in handy in monitoring overlap with other investments. If a stock has some kind of major event, you can check quickly and know how exposed you are to it. In an actively managed fund you just don’t know.

For example, if Elon Musk suddenly quits Tesla today, you could quickly figure out how much Tesla you are exposed to across your ETFs and make any necessary adjustments. With mutual funds, you’d be looking at data that were four to six months old, so you’d be in the dark, having no idea exactly how bad the situation was for you.

Figure 1.1 shows us the ETFs and mutual funds that have the biggest weighting to Tesla as of 6/16/2015. You can see that all of the ETFs have holding dates as of the day before, while the mutual funds are months old, and you don’t know if they’ve beefed up or unwound that Tesla position.

Figure 1.1 ETFs Show Their Holdings Every Day

Source: Bloomberg

There is one caveat to ETFs’ daily transparency and that is Vanguard. Vanguard only releases their ETF holdings monthly with a 15-day lag. Across only Vanguard’s ETF roster the ETF exists as a share class of Vanguard’s index mutual funds, and as such they don’t want those funds to be victims of front-running by disclosing holdings daily like other ETF providers do.1 Many of the early issuers chose to voluntarily disclose daily holdings for competitive reasons, but not because they are required. Still, the stand alone, transparent ETF structure is a consistent improvement relative to other types of funds.