An ETF or an Exchange Traded Fund is an investment fund that trades on a stock exchange.  An ETF is designed to duplicate the performance of an index such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500.  ETFs also exist that track commodities such as gold, silver, oil or corn.

To get a better understanding of an ETF it’s important to explore what is an index.  An index is a method used to measure the value of a section of the stock market.  Think of this as a tool to describe the performance of a sector or the stock market as a whole.  Listening to a business news channel such as CNBC you will hear phrases such as “The Dow is up 4% today” or “The S&P 500 is down 1%”.

It is impossible to invest in an index directly since they are mathematically constructed by financial information companies such as Dow Jones Index and as such only exist on paper.  One of the most widely used indexes, The Dow Jones Industrial Average tracks the performance of a weighted average allocation of 30 of the largest American companies.  Another large index, the S&P 500 tracks the performance of the 500 largest American companies that trade on major exchanges.  This is where ETFs come in!  An ETF is an investment fund that is composed of the exact same stocks in the exact same proportion as an index.  If an index rises by 1.5%, then the ETF will rise by the same amount because the ETF is a real life trading instrument that is identical to the index.  ETFs trade on stock exchanges such as NYSE and Nasdaq and can be bought and sold just like a regular stock.  ETFs are managed by investment management firms such as BlackRock who manages some of the largest and most popular ETFs.

The largest and most known ETF is the S&P500 index which trades under the ticker “SPY” and is operated by the second largest investment management firm in the world, State Street Global Advisors.  The stated objective of the ETF is to be “a fund that, before expenses, generally corresponds to the price and yield performance of the S&P 500® Index”.  An investor would want to invest in ETF such as SPY if they believe that the US companies that compose the index will experience growth.  Investing in the ETF directly gives the investor access to a diversified portfolio as buying SPY represents holdings in all 500 companies.  ETFs are similar and often compared to mutual funds in that respect with the key difference being that ETFs trade on stock exchanges while mutual funds do not.

Looking at the chart below we see that the ETF has fulfilled it’s objective of providing a return approximately equal to that of the index. SSGA charges a small annual fee for investors that hold the ETF of around 0.2% of the asset value.

Source: https://www.spdrs.com/product/fund.seam?ticker=spy

 Some of the other widely known and used indexes and their corresponding ETFs are: