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Our staff parses a lot of numbers while analyzing conventional and exchange-traded funds. An ETF is a basket of stocks that is bought and sold on a stock exchange as if it were a single stock.
Not all of the numbers make it into our published work. In the past we've shared lists of some of the more interesting mutual fund factoids we have run across. What follows is an ETF statistical potpourri that will amuse, enlighten or shock. Some of the numbers speak for themselves; others require a little explanation. Enjoy.
- 30%. The percentage of all domestically listed ETFs that have been launched in the past six months.
- 163 versus 134. The raw number of ETFs launched in the past six months versus the number of ETFs launched in first 10 years (1993 to 2003) of the ETF business' existence.
- 19 of 25. More than three-fourths of all bond ETFs available (19 out of 25) hit the market this year.
- 23 of 93. Of the 93 international ETFs on the market, only 23 are diversified funds that invest across a range of countries, regions and sectors. The rest are country- or region-specific or international-sector funds.
- 0.67%. The average expense ratio of ETFs launched in the past six months, many of which were leveraged index funds; sector, industry or niche funds (ophthalmology, for instance); or offerings tracking specialized or custom-made benchmarks.
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- 0.45%. The average expense ratio of all the ETFs launched before December 2006.
- $84 million. Management fees paid in 2006 by Barclays' largest ETF and the second-largest ETF in the business, the $46 billion in assets iShares MSCI EAFE Index (EFA, news, msgs), according to its most recent Statement of Additional Information. It paid more in management fees last year than half of all ETFs currently have in total assets. At the end of May 2007, 49.6% of the more than 500 ETFs in Morningstar's database had less than $84 million in assets.
- $284 billion versus $196 billion. Barclays' share of the ETF industry versus everybody else's.
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What's an ETF?Exchange-traded funds offer new ways to invest and diversify, but not without some potential negatives.
- Four. That's the number of holdings left in the smallest ETF stock portfolio. B2B Internet HOLDRs12/40 (BHH, news, msgs), which back in the halcyon days of the Internet craze included nearly 20 companies. Now it owns only CheckFree (CKFR, news, msgs), Ariba (ARBA, news, msgs), Agile Software (AGIL, news, msgs) and Internet Capital Group (ICGE, news, msgs). (CheckFree gobbles up more than two-thirds of the portfolio's assets.) The rest have succumbed to bankruptcy, delisting, mergers and acquisitions, or some combination thereof. This dramatizes the inherent weirdness of Merrill Lynch's HOLDRs, which don't track indexes like normal ETFs. HOLDRs are baskets of about 20 or so stocks selected by Merrill Lynch to represent a market, sector, subsector or industry. The only time they change is when there is a merger, acquisition or bankruptcy affecting one of the holdings. That methodological oddity has had a corrosive effect on an index full of business-to-business Internet companies whose turn-of-the-century promise never turned up.
- 60187 and 60532. ZIP codes from DuPage County, a suburban area west of Chicago that is home to three of the most aggressive young ETF families: PowerShares is headquartered in Wheaton, Ill., and First Trust Advisors and Claymore Advisors are located just a couple of miles away in Lisle, Ill.
Disclosure: Morningstar licenses its indexes to certain ETF providers, including Barclays Global Investors (BGI) and First Trust, for use in exchange-traded funds. These ETFs are not sponsored, issued or sold by Morningstar. Morningstar does not make any representation regarding the advisability of investing in ETFs that are based on Morningstar indexes.
This article was reported and written by Dan Culleton for Morningstar.
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