Psychology of ETF investing

Nelson writes the following:

It seems to me that the financial advisory industry as a whole spends a great deal of time creating instruments and building an investor culture that tries to act as if investing (or trading) can be simplified to a set of easy-to-follow rules and, hey, we’re professionals, so leave your money with us. I think it’s made even easier for them to convince people because the majority of people want to be convinced. They’re not that interested in thinking about how to invest their money — not really — so they do their best to wipe their hands of it, with all the consequences that entails.

This is absolutely correct. The psychology of “easy investing” has not changed since the dawn of cheap trading on the internet – the initial “brain-dead” way to invest was always going with a “trusted professional” (financial adviser, stockbroker, etc.) to make your decisions for you, since they clearly knew more than you did. Then for those that got jaded with the performance of such “trusted professionals” and eventually want to do-it-yourself, you have a whole host of products that essentially boil down to “stock pick” type newsletters (e.g. publications like the Motley Fool and TheStreet.Com, which are really fronts for subscriptions to newsletters). All of these don’t really involve any type of thinking – monkey see, monkey-do – if Cramer’s buying Amazon, might as well buy Amazon, eh?

Big banks, especially in Canada, will have you sit down in a branch with a “financial adviser” (who is really a salesperson for the funds the bank sells) and get you to fill in a simple questionnaire, which asks many questions to put you in one of three risk categories. If you were high risk (likely a “young” investor), you were suggested to invest 70% in equity funds, and 30% in bond funds. If you were medium risk, you are suggested to invest 40% in equity funds, 30% in “balanced” funds, and 30% in bond funds. If you are close to retirement and low risk, the suggestion will be 10% equity, 40% balanced, and 50% money-market funds. More “modern” suggested asset mixes may include 10-15% for “commodities”. Simple formulas to make investing easier.

Unfortunately, such cookie-cutter solutions will never provide superior returns. In fact, they will dramatically underperform. The reason is because of the fallacy that asset mix determines 90% of portfolio performance and neglecting to look at valuations.

Once an investor starts to realize that there is no informational benefit to newsletter-type subscriptions, or mutual funds, they will eventually shift to another form of control – exchange-traded funds, which essentially are mutual funds that are easier to buy and sell by virtue of being exchange-traded and not having to deal with an annoying bank middle-man. Once you give up and realize you can’t beat the market (the literature that suggests this starts to be compelling when you suffer losses), you will invest in the S&P 500 index fund, which apparently has slipped the actual index by 0.19% (which is actually not that bad, but slippage should be less than 5 basis points for such a large fund).

Even investing in different ETFs you have to do your homework and cannot apply a “cookie cutter” solution. There is no better example than with commodity-based ETFs.

Commodity-based ETFs that invest in underlying commodities with futures are very bad products. They experience huge trading losses when they have to rollover front-month contracts – the biggest culprit so far has been UNG, the United States Natural Gas ETF. Traders have absolutely ripped UNG’s investors to shreds, and rightfully so – investing in futures is not the same as investing in the commodity itself.

Commodity-based ETFs that invest in the underlying commodity (not futures) are legitimate long-term investment products – the best example is the Gold Trust (GLD), which invests in the physical metal. Your cost of investment is 0.4% per year instead of taking delivery of a gold bar and storing it in your own safety deposit box.

Note that I am making no opinion on the future pricing of natural gas or gold – I am just using these ETFs as an example. If I wanted to bet on a higher price of gold over the long run, I could consider the Gold Trust ETF. If I wanted to bet on a higher price of natural gas over the long run, I would not use the UNG ETF.

I have no issues with investing in ETFs – they provide much cheaper coverage than most mutual funds do, although there are some ETFs out there that are clearly geared towards traders/gamblers than actual investors. People that invest in most ETFs would likely be much better off looking at the top ten holdings and just investing proportionally in the common shares of such companies and will be able to save significant amounts of money from management expense ratios.

Just as an example, if you think energy will be a hot product in the future and choose to invest in XEG.TO (a Canadian energy sector fund), we see the following as the top 10 holdings:

17.74% SUNCOR ENERGY INC
14.02% CANADIAN NATURAL RESOURCES
9.31% ENCANA CORP
7.36% CENOVUS ENERGY INC
6.72% TALISMAN ENERGY INC
5.09% CANADIAN OIL SANDS TRUST
4.45% NEXEN INC
3.63% IMPERIAL OIL LTD
3.05% PENN WEST ENERGY TRUST
2.82% CRESCENT POINT ENERGY CORP

The MER of the fund is 0.55%, so if you invested $10,000 in XEG, you are paying roughly $55/year for management of the fund. This $55 is reduced from the dividend payments you would otherwise receive had you been invested in the common shares (which is a tax-inefficient way of paying for management expenses since such dividends are tax-preferred eligible dividends – a better way would be to bill ETF holders directly and they can take a full deduction for this expense from income). If you can scale into the 10 positions for less than $55 (which is easily done at a properly selected brokerage firm) then with a little mouse-clicking, you can save money on your long-term investments. Since 74% of the fund is invested in its top 10 holdings, the tracking error is trivial since the top 10 securities (74% of investments) are likely to be highly correlated investments to the other 26% in a sector fund.

The conclusions are fairly clear – for most passive index funds out there, it is better to just invest in individual components unless if you are dealing with small amounts of money, or small amounts of time.

True out-performance is difficult to achieve – it requires research, work, and sharp decision-making. It is very unlikely that Joe Investor out there will be able to outperform without going into microscopic details of individual securities. This requires skills such as being able to read financial statements, and knowledge of the sector. Not many people will want to do this – and thus, they will dump their RRSP money in some index fund since it is an easy decision to make and will likely underperform since others will be doing the same thing.

Canadian exchange traded debt statistics

There are 168 issues of exchange-traded debt available over the TSX. A lot of these issues are illiquid – 58 issues today did not trade.

None of these issues are trading below 60 cents.

There are 5 issues (3 issuers) that are trading between 60 and 69.9 cents.

There are 8 issues (6 issuers) that are trading between 70 and 79.9 cents.

There are 9 issues (8 issuers) that are trading between 80 and 89.9 cents.

There are 23 issues (21 issuers) that are trading between 90 and 99.9 cents.

The rest of the issues (123) are trading at 100 cents or greater.

If you compared these statistics with the same statistics one year ago, it would have been significantly different – there were lots of issues that were trading well below 80 cents.

The exchange traded debenture market on the TSX right now is mostly a done deal and investors should not look toward them to provide disproportionate returns beyond coupon payments. I have thoroughly analyzed the various issues that are trading cheaply, and there is limited value.

The events that occurred in late 2008 and early 2009 was likely a once in a decade opportunity in the corporate debt market. Time to start looking at equities again once everything matures.

Replacing ING Direct

The place where I normally park cash is in ING Direct, which has been a mainstay financial institution for myself for a very long time. When they first opened, they were by far and away the best place to park cash. Now they are a mediocre offering of the many online products that are available out there. I am guessing that they achieved their desired level of deposits and have achieved their desired debt-to-equity ratio with their residential mortgage offerings.

ING Direct hasn’t contaminated their customer experience by spamming their customer base with too many useless services, but this encroachment to simplicity has been eroding at a faster pace as of late – see my post about RSP loans, for example. It is simplicity that has caused me to stick around with ING Direct instead of shopping for other services. However, that time has now come.

So today I sent in a cheque to Ally, which used to be known as GMAC. Obviously since GM tarnished their brand with their bankruptcy filing and investing money in an institution that shares the same name with a bankrupt entity doesn’t inspire much confidence, they changed their name in 2009. In Canada, they are run by a firm called ResMor Trust Company, which otherwise does mortgages. In any event, they are CDIC insured and this means that the taxpayers of Canada will be picking up the guarantee for deposits up to $100,000.

Since I will not be depositing more than $100,000 in Ally, the safety issue of the institution is more or less mitigated.

Their peak offering is a savings account which delivers 2% interest (which is subject to change at anytime), but since this is significantly higher than ING Direct’s offering at 1.2%, it is a trivial process to click a few mouse buttons and transfer the money. Every dollar counts.

As interest rates rise, it will be interesting to see the spread between these two institutions since they are competing for the same bucket of capital from Joe Saver.

Canadian Interest Rate Projections

The financial media is catching wind that interest rates are going to be increasing. Although I believe the Bank of Canada is fairly firm in holding their overnight rate at 0.25% until the end of June, the question remains how much they will raise rates in July. I thought that it was going to be an evolutionary 0.25% increase over the next scheduled meetings of the central bank, but there might be a larger jump.

Futures markets are signaling the following compared to the same time last month (January 2009):

Month / Strike Bid Price Ask Price Settl. Price Net Change Vol.
+ 10 MR 0.000 99.545 99.550 99.550 -0.005 4412
+ 10 AL 0.000 0.000 0.000 99.510 0.000 0
+ 10 MA 0.000 0.000 0.000 99.460 0.000 0
+ 10 JN 0.000 99.400 99.410 99.410 0.000 16860
+ 10 SE 0.000 99.030 99.040 99.030 0.000 19502
+ 10 DE 0.000 98.630 98.640 98.630 0.000 17457
+ 11 MR 0.000 98.240 98.250 98.250 0.000 2335
+ 11 JN 0.000 97.900 97.920 97.910 0.000 1360
+ 11 SE 0.000 97.550 97.620 97.600 -0.010 175
+ 11 DE 0.000 0.000 97.350 97.300 -0.050 56
+ 12 MR 0.000 97.000 97.090 97.050 0.000 0
+ 12 JN 0.000 96.740 96.870 96.810 -0.040 7
+ 12 SE 0.000 96.530 96.670 96.600 -0.030 7
+ 12 DE 0.000 96.320 96.500 96.370 0.030 7

We can see the projected interest rate for December 2010 is 1.36%, while December 2011 is around 2.7%.

Another metric to look at is long term bond rates – 5-year bond rates (which determine how expensive 5-year fixed rate mortgages will be) are currently trading at 2.56%, but this has not changed too much over the past half year.  If the markets were anticipating significant amounts of inflation, they would most likely hit the longer term bond markets first.

The expectation theory states that long term rates are a representation of the short term rates that will existing throughout the maturity of the debt.  As such, the markets are expecting an average of 2.56% over the next five years – since rates for the next 5 months will be at 0.25%, it hints there will be a period of time where we will see short term rates at or around 3%.  Interest rate futures say this will be around March and June of 2012.

My financial crystal ball suggests that the markets are pricing this in correctly.

Since the yield spread (between the 10 year and 2 year bond) is around 2.1%, it does suggest that there will be some sort of economic recovery – my sense in terms of how to play this is to load up on commodities until the yield curve flattens.  When the yield curve flattens, the party is over.

Canada Pension Plan, Q3-2010

The Canadian Pension Plan reported its fiscal third quarter, with a 1.8% return on investments between October 1 and December 31, 2009. The asset mix of the fund is as follows:

* Equities represented 56.1 per cent of the investment portfolio or $69.5 billion. That amount consisted of 43.9 per cent public equities valued at $54.4 billion and 12.2 per cent private equities valued at $15.1 billion.
* Fixed income, which includes bonds, money market securities, other debt and debt financing liabilities represented 30.0 per cent or $37.3 billion.
* Inflation-sensitive assets represented 13.9 per cent or $17.2 billion. Of those assets,
o 5.8 per cent consisted of real estate valued at $7.1 billion
o 4.9 per cent was infrastructure assets valued at $6.1 billion
o 3.2 per cent was inflation-linked bonds valued at $4.0 billion.

The TSX reported a 3.1% gain over the same period of time, so when one considers their asset mix (together with the fact that fixed income yields have slightly risen, thus resulting in value declines), the CPP had an average quarter.

The CPP requires a 6.2% nominal rate of return (4.2% real rate) in order to meet its long term investment objectives. While this number is realistic, it will also be challenging to realize these returns strictly within the North American confines – in order to achieve disproportionate returns, the CPP investment managers need to be looking abroad. Investing outside your known jurisdictions, however, can be very hazardous to your financial health, so I hope these guys know what they are doing.

Since April 1999 the CPP has realized 5.3% nominal returns, which means they are trailing by about 15% when you do the math – the actuary will likely have to boost the target rate of return needed to keep the CPP solvent to around 6.4% in order to catch up.

Still, the CPP is light-years ahead of the USA equivalent, social security. Canada did most of the heavy lifting on this issue in the 1990’s and it is one of the unspoken achievements of the Jean Chretien administration to put in a relatively permanent fix to this issue.