Anyone here holding semiconductor ETFs?

Anyone here holding semiconductor ETFs?

Go vekc out mrfiredupwealth channel. He does hold some semi conductor etf. You need to sieve through his video to get what he holds.

Go vekc out mrfiredupwealth channel. He does hold some semi conductor etf. You need to sieve through his video to get what he holds.

Bro Ramjade, TOS ...what is an active ETF trading USD?
I cannot find DXY ETF in Tiger Brokers.

Try UUP
USDU (bull USD)
UDN (bear USD)

Just note that UUP is an ETF that invests in DXY Futures, so u wont get any dividends.

And you can get a double whammy if USD weakens further.

Eg from peak USD in Oct last year, UUP has dropped  abt 10% in USD terms. Meaning in MYR terms u would have lost nearly 20% from October.

But of course, if USD strenghtens, u get double the benefit.

Just note that UUP is an ETF that invests in DXY Futures, so u wont get any dividends.

And you can get a double whammy if USD weakens further.

Eg from peak USD in Oct last year, UUP has dropped  abt 10% in USD terms. Meaning in MYR terms u would have lost nearly 20% from October.

But of course, if USD strenghtens, u get double the benefit.

The peak was at end of Sept at 30.76 🤦‍♀️

UUP is Invesco Bullish US Currency fund so beware of it as it uses DXY while USDU uses Bloomberg Dollar Index to track

One is pure USD currency index while the latter is major is currencies weighted

Bro Xander, firstly thank you...but your post meaning? I only see UUP, ...whats the ETF for weighted currencies?

Thanks all Sifus, i shall endeavour to become more self reliant...i have strong bias against machines.

Insider traders have used exchange traded funds to conceal billions of dollars’ worth of trades, according to a team of academics who say their finding may be just the “tip of the iceberg”.

Their analysis suggests at least $2.75bn worth of anomalous trades occurred in US-listed ETFs before merger and acquisition announcements between 2009 and 2021.

“Our findings suggest insider trading is more pervasive than just the ‘direct’ forms that have been the focus of research and enforcement to date,” the academics from institutions in Sweden and Australia said in the paper, Using ETFs to Conceal Insider Trading.

Fraudsters with inside knowledge of an upcoming corporate bid have traditionally been caught because they bought the securities of the target company directly, or arranged for co-conspirators to do so.

However, heightened regulatory scrutiny may have led some individuals with inside information to instead buy the stock or options of an economically linked company — typically a sector peer — that might also be expected to rise in price when a bid for its rival becomes public.

The illegality of such “shadow trading” remains unclear, with the first case to be prosecuted in the US, involving trading in options linked to Incyte, a pharmaceutical company, in 2016, still trundling through the courts.

The paper claims that some individuals in possession of material non-public M&A information have gone one step further and traded in an ETF instead, typically a sector fund germane to the target company.

Tālis J Putniņš, co-author of the paper, said this had several advantages. One is that the ETF will probably include the target company itself, almost guaranteeing a “pop” when the deal becomes public, as well as a wide range of sector peers, reducing idiosyncratic risk.

“One can get a direct exposure to the company’s share price via the ETF, but in a vehicle that is more subtle than trading the company shares directly, helping reduce scrutiny from law enforcement,” the paper said.

Second, “the ETF can be more liquid than the underlying stocks. Insider traders want to hide what they are doing and can do so in liquid ETFs”, Putniņš argued.

Again, the illegality of such activity is unclear. “It’s in a legal grey zone at the moment until there is a precedent set in the courts,” he added.

Nevertheless, Putniņš and his colleagues found statistically significant increases in ETF trading volume in a five-day window before the announcement of a takeover offer in 3-6 per cent of cases between 2009 and 2021. The analysis was limited to M&A bids that were not preceded by public rumours to avoid cases where heightened trading was driven by information leakage, and was adjusted to account for the statistical probability that some ETFs would have seen abnormal volume before price-sensitive news purely by chance.

The total volume of what the researchers deemed to be shadow trading was $2.75bn, concentrated primarily in the healthcare, technology and industrials sectors.

Among the ETFs that were most frequently used by insiders, according to the researchers, were the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), Vanguard Industrials ETF (VIS) and Vanguard Health Care ETF (VHT).

Peter Sleep, senior portfolio manager at 7IM, noted that these are modified market cap ETFs in which the smaller, mid-cap stocks that are most likely to be takeover targets have a greater weight than in a traditional market cap ETF.

“This means that if there is M&A activity in a smaller company it will have more of an impact on the ETF and greater profit for the illegal activity,” he said.

The paper found an increase in anomalous trades from the first part of the period, 2009-13, to the next, 2014-19, which the authors attributed to “the increasing popularity and liquidity of ETFs as an investment vehicle, making it more attractive to use ETFs for shadow trading”.

However, they found little evidence of such activity in the final two years of the study period, 2020 and 2021. The researchers posited two potential explanations for this.

An optimistic take is that increased regulatory scrutiny of insider and shadow trading, driven by the Incyte case and the passage of the Insider Trading Prohibition Act in 2021 in the US, may have deterred such activity.


Alternatively, though, it could simply be that the sharp rise in ETF trading witnessed from 2020 onwards means a fixed volume of shadow trading no longer registers as statistically significant.

“If ETFs are very liquid and highly traded, shadow trading becomes difficult to detect via abnormal trading measures,” the paper added.

Putniņš believed that future scrutiny of the options market — which affords greater leverage — could provide even firmer evidence of shadow trading in ETFs. Some of his previous research has covered insider trading activity in the options market.

“The paper adds to our knowledge that shadow trading is going on in ETFs and it is something that the regulators need to consider, particularly in the light of greater options trading in the US,” said Sleep.

Fixed-income exchange traded funds can suck the liquidity out of corporate bonds during times of market stress, potentially worsening price dislocations during crises, academics have claimed.

Bond ETFs are generally perceived as innovations that have enhanced liquidity and aided price discovery during market ruptures, offering a superior option than attempting to trade in the underlying bonds.

During the Covid-driven market sell-off in March-April 2020, scores of fixed-income ETFs plunged to unprecedented discounts to their net asset value.

With the benefit of hindsight, the prevailing view is that it was the relatively liquid ETFs that were trading at fair prices, and that many of the underlying bonds were simply not changing hands and were thus being quoted at stale, unrealistically high, prices. In this version of events, ETFs were the good guys, offering a tool for distressed sellers who needed to exit, or at least hedge their exposures, while also allowing bargain hunters to step in and steady the market.

However, academics from a trio of US business schools suggest that ETFs’ role is not always benign, and during market dislocations can actually worsen the state of the underlying market.

The potential problem stems from the creation and redemption baskets that ETF issuers trade with market makers known as authorised participants (APs) in order to handle inflows to, or outflows from, their ETFs.

Unlike equity ETFs, bond funds’ creation and redemptions baskets typically do not include every bond in the index they are tracking, as this can encapsulate hundreds, or even thousands, of separate issues.

In their paper, Steering a Ship in Illiquid Waters: Active Management of Passive Funds, the academics argue that in normal times a bond’s inclusion in an ETF basket makes the bond more liquid, as a random mix of creations and redemptions increases trading activity.

However, during a crisis, when many investors are rushing for the door, redemptions hugely outweigh creations. In that scenario, if a bond is included in the basket, the APs “may then become reluctant to purchase more of the same bonds, reducing their liquidity”, the paper said.

During the wave of selling at the height of the coronavirus crisis, “bonds heavily represented in redemption baskets became heavily represented in APs’ inventory”, it added.

“Given their balance sheet constraints, APs became reluctant to purchase even more of the same bonds in their role as market makers. Bonds present in redemption baskets thus lost their most natural buyers.

“When its own market makers do not want to buy it, a security can become quite illiquid.”

“The illiquidity of the underlying bonds can be partially ascribed to inclusion in redemption baskets,” added Yao Zeng, assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the paper.

If this is true, then the fast-growing corporate bond ETF sector may be gumming up the underlying fixed-income market during crises, a problem that might be expected to intensify as the ETF market continues to grow.

The paper comes after both the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements raised questions about the impact of ETFs during stressed markets.

However Dan Izzo, chief executive of GHCO, an ETF market maker, disputed the latest findings.

Izzo argued that the causality ran in the opposite direction — it is because some bonds are illiquid that they increasingly feature in redemption baskets as sell-offs intensify, not vice versa.

He explains it thus: on the first day of a crisis, an ETF issuer might publish a preferred redemption basket but the APs might say they can only accept, say, 80 per cent of it, as the rest is too illiquid.

If the issuer agrees to that trade, by day two, it is increasingly desperate to get rid of some of the illiquids, as the ETF’s tracking error to its underlying index may be rising. The share of illiquids in its desired redemption basket might thus rise from 20 per cent to 40 per cent.

This process continues until either the APs reluctantly accept the illiquid paper (or the equivalent cash proceeds if the issuer itself sells the illiquids and puts the proceeds in the basket) or the selling pressure abates and inflows turn positive.

“The illiquidity is causing the issuer to put it in a more concentrated weight in the basket to try and either get us to take it from them or find a price,” said Izzo, who argued that the rise of ETFs had actually increased liquidity during periods of market stress.

“The traditional approach across the entire fixed-income industry to a bond crisis is to do nothing. The default behaviour is that everyone — outside the ETF creates and redeems — just turns their chair, looks away and says ‘we will wait it out’.

“If the bonds don’t trade then you don’t have to write them down. For illiquid bonds, you can’t even find a bid or an offer.

“ETFs have brought liquidity into the market at times of crisis where it has never existed before,” added Izzo, who said that during the Covid crash GHCO bought bond ETFs at a 20 per cent markdown and held them on its books, a strategy that ultimately proved highly profitable.

MJ Lytle, chief executive of Tabula Investment Management, a bond ETF specialist, and a former Morgan Stanley fixed-income trader, also disputed the findings.

He accepted that as a sell-off intensifies, illiquid securities would tend to carry a greater weight in redemption baskets as issuers strive to keep their index tracking in alignment.

However, Lytle said he did not “get the idea that a bond gets tainted” by being in a basket during a period of market stress.

“I don’t see any evidence of a systemic problem.”

Blackrock benefits the most from fund flows into bond ETFs.

Blackrock benefits the most from fund flows into bond ETFs.

US listed bond etf sucks because of WHT..

I am pretty sure you have heard of the term "tax arbitrage". Euromarkets like Ireland and Luxembourg offer you "tax-efficient" UCITS alternatives. 

Still have WHT right? tho lesser.