Checking your investments too often can be a good way to end up out of pocket.

This wisdom, gained from behavioural finance experiments showing that too much information leads to “myopic loss aversion”, could lead investors to believe they should just “set it and forget it”. However, experts insist you should know what you own, and even if you want to retain the same exposure, you should check to see if there is now a cheaper way of doing so.

In the fast-evolving investment fund industry, this can often be the case. First, exchange traded funds usually offer much lower fees than their mutual fund counterparts, and this partly explains why they continue to grab market share. But even within the ETF market, price competition has been fierce, so it is worth checking whether a lower-fee version of the ETF you already own has been launched.

Then, after looking at fees, the decisions become increasingly complex, experts warn, and there are additional considerations if you are an overseas investor of a US equity fund.

First, you should consider the cost of moving to another fund with the same exposure.

There will be trading fees to consider. If your original investment has appreciated significantly in price, there could be a parallel significant capital gains tax to pay.

Investors should also think carefully and seek advice on choosing their desired fund.

“When investors are thinking about funds, they should think about several factors after they have worked out their desired exposure. These include currency, fees, trading spreads and tax considerations,” said Brett Pybus, head of iShares Emea investment and product strategy.

He points out that it can be a complex task to balance all of these costs and there is no one-size-fits-all advice to give an investor because it depends on their individual circumstances.

However, Pybus said that tax was something investors frequently overlooked.

“The behaviour we observed in the past is that people tended to look for the largest and most liquid product and tended to ignore tax complications, but clients we speak to today understand why we have developed different ETFs with the same exposure,” Pybus said.

For investors intent on gaining exposure to US equities, an important factor to look out for is withholding tax on dividends.

When a US company pays a dividend to a non-US citizen, a 30 per cent tax rate applies, although many overseas jurisdictions have a treaty that halves this to 15 per cent, Roger Wise, tax partner at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, explained. The tax applies to distributions by US ETFs and mutual funds.

The dividend tax burden helps to explain why there are far more Ireland-domiciled Ucits ETFs — Ireland benefits from the tax treaty — than Luxembourg-domiciled Ucits ETFs, which have to pay the full amount.

“A US ETF or mutual fund is not necessarily tax-efficient for a non-US investor,” Wise said.

Nonetheless, investors who have genuinely taken the set-it-and-forget-it advice might still own the US-domiciled versions of US equity ETFs, which predate their overseas-domiciled counterparts. This ownership is another thing to think carefully about. While you could save by moving to an Ireland-domiciled Ucits ETF, for example, you would still face capital gains tax when you sell your original holding.

Also, while an investor might end up better off tax-wise by investing in a non-US-domiciled fund, they might lose out in terms of liquidity and fees.

A fund with higher liquidity might have narrower spreads, lowering the cost of trades, Wise pointed out. But it depends on how much you intend to trade — for most self-directed retail investors, who are trading in relatively smaller amounts, liquidity might be a relatively insignificant factor.

When balancing tax considerations, there are further complexities relating to your intermediary, for example if you have US equity exposure through a pension scheme or insurer.

Pension plans and other institutions such as sovereign wealth funds will rely on their own tax status and might be able to avoid paying US withholding tax, but not all institutions have this status.

“Not all institutions and countries are tax exempt. All pension funds might not have agreements and many private banks, for example, can certainly be liable to withholding tax,” said Keshava Shastry, global head of capital markets for DWS, an asset manager.

For investors based in the US and Europe, there are well-established locally listed ETFs that offer investors the ability to invest across the globe. For investors in some markets in Asia and Latin America, it might be that holding a Ucits ETF is tax-efficient for some exposures, such as US equities, away from their home markets.

“We always say investors should know what they own. And for ETF investors, that also means looking at the domicile of the ETF they hold,” Pybus said.

TL;DR version - buy full replication ETFs XD
right? i just jumped to the conclusion and whys

Later this month, the US ETF industry turns 30 years old. The first US-listed ETF, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), launched on January 22nd, 1993. The ETF that started it all never looked back and currently sits atop the ETF throne with $353 billion in assets. The next two largest ETFs also happen to track the S&P 500. The iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) holds $288 billion in assets and the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) has $279 billion. My first prediction is that one of these ETFs (my money is on VOO) captures SPY’s ETF crown by the end of the year.

. . . My prediction is that money will continue flowing out of expensive, underperforming active mutual funds and find its way into the cheapest, core beta exposure out there. That means IVV and VOO, not SPY. I’ll feel even more confident in this prediction if markets have another tough year, where further drawdowns will unlock opportunities for investors with taxable accounts to switch out of suboptimal investment vehicles and move into ETFs. Vanguard, in particular, usually cleans-up in these environments.

SPY will always be the granddaddy of ETFs, but even a respected king has to pass the crown eventually.

BlackRock has joined forces with the neobroker Bux to offer low-cost savings plans that use exchange traded funds in a push by the world’s largest asset manager to encourage more retail investors across Europe to adopt ETFs.

Investors will be able to build investment portfolios of up to 10 BlackRock iShares ETFs in a so-called savings plan that will cost a flat fee of just €1 per month on the Bux platform. Investors will be able to make portfolio trades that can adjust the allocations across all of the ETFs they hold for a €1 commission fee and the minimum required investment has been set at just €10 per month to appeal to younger savers.

The Bux ETF savings plan will be launched in eight countries — the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Austria and Ireland — on January 31.

The initiative shows how the cut-throat price war over ETF fees is spreading into other areas of financial services, such as savings plans and transaction costs for fund trading.

Thirty providers of ETF savings plans in Europe use BlackRock’s iShares with a growing number of banks and online brokers seeing a significant acceleration in ETF adoption by retail investors on digital investment platforms. About 3.1mn savings plans that use iShares ETFs have already been established and BlackRock is predicting that 10mn new investors across Europe will starting buying ETFs via digital investing channels over the next five years, creating a new pool of assets that could be worth €500bn by the end of 2026.

Yorick Naeff, chief executive of Bux, said that the new ETF savings plans would appeal to younger or less confident investors that might feel daunted by their lack of experience or knowledge of financial markets.

“By joining forces with BlackRock, we have created a good solution for clients that are overwhelmed by the choice of products and don’t know how and when to start investing,” said Naeff.

Christian Bimueller, BlackRock’s head of digital distribution in continental Europe, said that the new partnership with Bux would “create an efficient way for investors across Europe to reap the benefits of ETFs and invest in global markets in a simple, accessible and cost-efficient way”.

Germany, which already has about 5mn ETF savings plans, according to BlackRock, has emerged as one of the key battlegrounds for new investors’ money. DWS, the asset management arm of Deutsche Bank, and Vanguard, the world’s second largest asset manager, have also signed up distribution partners to entice interest from retail investors.

Trade Republic, the German online broker and another of BlackRock’s distribution partners, expanded into 11 new European countries in October, showing how the model of using ETF investment plans to appeal to retail investors is spreading rapidly across Europe.

Until now, investment flows and trading activity in Europe’s $1.4tn ETF industry have been almost entirely dominated by large institutional players, unlike the US which has attracted far higher levels of participation by retail investors.

But some top European regulators believe that encouraging more retail investors to use ETFs instead of actively managed mutual funds could lead to better returns for consumers.

Mairead McGuinness, the EU’s financial services chief, has expressed support for a ban on inducements that are paid to financial advisers by asset managers for recommending a product to a client. ETF providers do not pay these inducements, which are also known as retrocessions, to financial advisers. The absence of any financial incentive for an adviser to recommend an ETF to a client is widely seen as one of the key reasons for the relatively slow rate of adoption among European retail investors.

“Low-cost products like exchange traded funds are hardly ever recommended and this impacts the net returns that consumers can expect,” said McGuinness, at a meeting last week of the European parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee.

Anyone here holding semiconductor ETFs?

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.”

US listed bond etf sucks because of WHT..

Still have WHT right? tho lesser.

The already denuded technology sector is about to be stripped of yet more companies in the latest shake-up of industry definitions, pushing stock concentration to unprecedented highs.

Back in 2018 erstwhile tech titans Facebook (now Meta), Netflix, Twitter, Snap and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, were reclassified as communication services companies under the widely followed Global Industry Classification Standards (GICS) framework. With Amazon already classed as a consumer discretionary company, this means only one of the infamous five FAANGs — Apple — was actually technically still a tech stock.

Now Visa and Mastercard, two of the five largest remaining technology companies, are about to be reclassified as financials, alongside the likes of PayPal and Fiserv, while Automatic Data Processing and PayChex are among those being shipped off to industrials.

The moves will raise the weighting of Apple and Microsoft, which already account for a combined 44.4 per cent of the S&P 500 Information Technology sector, to almost 50 per cent.

“The changes reinforce our unfavourable view on tech exchange traded funds, which will grow more concentrated. We prefer equal-weighted sector ETFs,” said analysts at BofA Securities.

The impact will vary widely from fund to fund, however. The $158bn Invesco QQQ ETF (QQQ), often thought of as a tech fund, will be unaffected as it invests in the largest non-financial Nasdaq-listed companies irrespective of sector, ranging from PepsiCo to Walgreens Boots Alliance and Marriott International.

The repercussions for the $49bn Vanguard Information Technology ETF (VGT) and the $40.1bn Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK), the world’s two largest sector ETFs, according to data from Morningstar Direct, will differ, however — in part because some are already as tightly concentrated as US regulations permit.

Under the US Internal Revenue Code, regulated investment companies, which include funds, must ensure that no more than 25 per cent of their assets are invested in a single issuer, or company, at the end of each quarter, and that the sum of the weights of all issuers representing more than 5 per cent of the fund should not exceed 50 per cent.

The S&P 500 Technology Select Sector Index, tracked by XLK, already appears to be fully maxed out by these parameters, with Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia, the third-largest remaining tech company, having a combined weighting of 50.45 per cent, and Apple alone at 23.04 per cent.

This means their weight cannot rise any further post the rejig, which for S&P indices will occur after the close of trading on March 17.

As a result the index, and any fund tracking it such as XLK, will be underweight the big three, vis-à-vis their underlying market capitalisations, and overweight the remaining tech companies, headed by Broadcom, Cisco Systems and Salesforce.

Matthew Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas research at State Street Global Advisors, said the changes were “relatively minor from a weighting perspective and the fund will continue to have a very diversified exposure to the technology sector”.

In contrast, VGT tracks small and mid-cap tech stocks, as well as the blue-chip names in the S&P 500, so its exposure to the largest companies is somewhat diluted.

As of January 31, the latest available data, VGT’s combined exposure to Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia was 43.6 per cent, giving it headroom to rise further when MSCI (whose index VGT tracks) implements the GICS changes, which will occur in May.

Thus VGT’s exposures will probably be in line with the underlying market caps, but it will become more concentrated in a handful of stocks.

Vanguard said it was still analysing the likely impact on its funds, but added that “GICS changes will have little impact on investors in broadly diversified equity funds, like Total Stock Market Index or 500 Index”.

The story is different again for the $8.8bn iShares US Technology ETF (IYW), which tracks a version of the Russell 1000 Technology index. FTSE Russell does not follow the GICS framework, instead using its own Industry Classification Benchmark.

As a result, IYW invests in some companies off limits to VGT and XLK, such as Meta, Alphabet and Pinterest. The forthcoming GICS changes will narrow the divide however, as FTSE Russell does not classify Visa and Mastercard as tech stocks (they are instead ranked as America’s two largest industrial companies).

The ripples from the GICS rejig will spread further still. BofA believes it will lead to net selling of the payments giants, with tech funds selling $15bn worth of stock but financials funds buying just $11bn.

With a combined market cap of almost $800bn, Visa and Mastercard are on track to become the second and fourth-largest stocks respectively in the S&P 500 financials sector.

Bartolini supported the transfer of Visa and Mastercard saying they “should probably be in financials, given their relationship to the financial industry itself. That change is really welcomed by investors, as far as the conversations we have had,” he added.

As to the conflation of the FAANGs acronym with technology, Bartolini said: “It’s catchy, it caught on and it can lead to confusion.

“It became mainstream in the financial lexicon and it’s unlikely to go away, even though FAANGs is not representative of technology or innovation or high growth.”

I have managed to open all 3 Account now.Its my first time using IKBR how would one perform step 8?Buy Ireland based S&P500 ETF off London Stock Exchange.is there some step by step or guide I can follow?

Also is the reason why use the Sunway Money to transfer the money into CIMB Sg instead of transferring from CIMB My purely for better rate convert?

Thank you , this been very helpful. How would one proceed to buy this Vanguard ETF for example on IKBR ? I am not familiar with this IKBR website actually and when it try to navigate it seems to be slightly confusing.

Investors in a suite of Canadian exchange traded funds face being trapped for an extended period after regulators imposed an “indefinite” trading ban on the funds.

Both primary and secondary market trading has been suspended in 11 ETFs after their sponsor, Emerge Canada, failed to file audited financial statements by a March 31 deadline.

The “cease trade order” imposed by the Ontario Securities Commission means that both the creation and redemption of shares in the funds has been halted, and that existing investors cannot sell their units to other investors in the secondary market.

“The CTO means that while we still actively manage our strategies and performance continues, liquidity cannot be achieved as there cannot be any creations/buys of units or redemptions/sales of units,” said Lisa Langley, chief executive of Emerge Canada, in a statement.

Analysts said the trading ban was unprecedented for an ETF anywhere in the world.

“I have heard of similar cease trading orders being issued for individual companies, but a CTO for an ETF provider is a first for me,” said Bryan Armour, director of passive strategies research, North America, at Morningstar.

Deborah Fuhr, co-founder of consultancy ETFGI, said she was unaware of any previous cases of ETF trading being suspended because of a failure to file accounts.

However, ETFs have been suspended or delisted for a variety of other reasons, such as failing to meet minimum criteria for the size of assets or number of investors, or because trading in some or all of the underlying securities has been halted, she said.

This happened last year when trading in Russian equity ETFs was suspended after the invasion of Ukraine, said Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at consultancy VettaFi.

The Ontario Securities Commission told the FT it had never “previously taken similar action against a family of ETFs”. It said the CTO was issued for an “indefinite period of time” and that “when a CTO is issued with no expiry date, it will remain in effect until . . . when and if the company or individual corrects the deficiencies or meets certain conditions”. 

Emerge Canada’s ETFs have combined assets of C$109mn ($82mn).

The Toronto-based company was the first Canadian distributor of Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest ETF range, which accounts for six of its ETFs. The other five are in its EMPWR range, a roster of “elite, emerging women portfolio managers . . . with a special focus on promoting sustainability, diversity and equality within the industry”.

Emerge Canada bills itself as “Canada’s first and only woman-owned investment fund firm”.

It announced in a securities filing in December that BDO Canada LLP had resigned as auditor of its ETFs “on its own initiative” on November 3.

With BDO yet to be replaced, the ETFs missed the deadline to file audited annual financial statements, management’s reports of fund performance and associated filings for 2022 by the prescribed deadline of March 31.

Langley said in a statement to the FT that “the decision to end the relationship [with BDO Canada] was mutual. Since then, we have been engaging in discussions with other potential auditing partners to secure a new auditor.

“Due to our shift to a new auditor, our 2022 financial statements missed the filing deadline, and we are working diligently to complete the requirements provided by the OSC,” she added.

BDO Canada declined to comment.

Langley added that “we are unable to provide any assurances on the timing of lifting of the CTO or whether the CTO will be lifted at all”.

She reiterated that the ETFs “still exist and they have value. All assets of the Emerge ETFs are held in custody by our custodian, RBC Investor Services.”

“This is an unusual sequence of events,” said Armour. “The company’s former auditor resigned in November 2022, so it raises the question of why they haven’t replaced the auditor in the five months since.”

Armour feared the trading suspension could be both long running and potentially terminal for at least some of the affected funds.

“The order requires Emerge to secure a new auditor and file audited annual financial statements before trading is allowed to resume. I would not expect that process to happen overnight, so investors in Emerge ETFs may be held captive for a while longer,” he said.

“I would anticipate many will consider selling their shares once the CTO is lifted.”

Fuhr did not, though, believe that Emerge Canada’s travails should deter people from investing in other small providers, which account for the bulk of the 657 ETF issuers currently active globally.

“Given it hasn’t happened before and there are a lot of small ETF issuers out there, I wouldn’t want to raise a flag about having these issues. It might be a bit alarmist,” she said.

Armour agreed. “I would not conflate this issue with small ETF providers more broadly. This seems to be an Emerge Canada-specific problem that I don’t expect to occur very often,” he said.