Reviewing Exchange Traded Funds : Market dimensional impacts on profitability

Sammanfattning: Background: Ever since Sharpe, Treynor and Jensen advanced the methods of fund performance evaluation in the 60’s it has been a popular field of study in academia. As the intricacies of fund performance was untangled it became clear that paying for active management doesn’t yield higher cost adjusted returns. An Index investment strategy is the most sensible approach and it’s the associated cost which separate index vehicles. Exchange traded funds have risen as a competitor to the conventional index mutual fund but the research evaluating these is very scarce. The research conducted comparing the costs of the two vehicles do not take into account implicit transaction costs that in turn depend on specific market microstructure designs and could affect the cost relationship. The problem: Do liquidity and market structural disparities between markets affect the cost relationship between exchange traded funds and index mutual funds, through the implicit transaction cost? Objective of the research: The objective of this paper is to examine whether structural differences between markets affect implicit transaction costs to the extent that the cost relationship between index funds and exchange traded funds differ from earlier findings. Method: The need to generalize the findings prompted a quantitative approach to the research. Comparative examination will be done on the microstructure and liquidity of two different markets. The transaction costs will then be measured with statistical means and incorporated in a cost comparison model. Result and conclusion: There are architectural and liquidity differences between the two sample markets allowing for systematic differences in transaction cost, which were found but were not a significant contributor to the tracking error cost of the index mutual funds. The Swedish ETF do not get more profitable as the investment sum increases. A finding which contradicts earlier findings and is likely a consequence of the Swedish tax-laws for capital gains as well as the higher levels of management fees for ETFs. ETFs might still be a worthwhile investment since they possess unique qualitative benefits.