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Dave Nadig
3:00
Good afternoon!
Thanks for joining ETF.com Live!
3:01
You can enter your questions in the box below, and I'll type till my hands hurt too much.  We'll have a transcript up at the end of the day in case you miss anything.
So let's get started - no question too dumb, I promise.
Todd Rosenbluth - CFRA research
3:01
Dave - Love the new stock finder tool on ETF.com as big believer that holdings matter a lot with ETFs. What’s an example of what might surprise investors about what’s inside a well known ETF?
Dave Nadig
3:01
Hey Todd!  So, actually I did stumble across a funny one when we were testing out the tool.
If you go to etf.com/stock/msft
you sort of get a usual suspects list at first glance.
3:02
Tech ETFs, some large cap ETFs, and so on.
But then I sorted by the "who owns a lot" column on the right.
3:03
rather than just the "who's got a big % in it"
and holy cats: Vanguard's VALUE fund, VTV, has MSFT as it's top holding
3:04
Which I find somewhat hilarious, because right next to it on that same list is IWF, ishares Russell 1000 GROWTH etf.
If that doesn't prove the point about having to look under the hood I don't know what does.
The reason, of course, is that different style funds have (very) different methodologies for determining what a "value" stock is, or a growth stock, or anything else.
3:05
So if there's some stock you follow, it's an interesting way to kind of back into some methodology differences that might surprise you.
I'll stick to a theme and put this question in now too:
Mr. Ed
3:05
Your new ETF stock finder only works for single company tickers, will it allow me to look up which ETFs hold ETFs some day?  Fund of funds you know
Dave Nadig
3:05
So right now if you go to etf.com/stock/spy, you don't get anything.  Ideally, what you want to see there is as Ed says, all the ETFs that happen to own SPY.
3:06
We're definitely working on this.
It's a bit of a challenge, because what you want is the best of both worlds.  Right now for instance, if you hit ETF.com/FV, you see that it holds 5 other ETFs.
thats good, you should know going in that its an ETF rotation strategy
3:07
but what you ALSO what to know is what the overall portfolio has in terms of, say, P/E.
Or, country exposure, etc.
so what we do is use FactSet's data to "look through" to the underlying holdings for those calculatoins
we just haven't gotten the logic around /stock/ticker to reflect it precisely right.
But thanks for trying it out!
Anonymous
3:08
Will more firms follow Vanguard and offer all ETFs commission free?
Dave Nadig
3:08
So, in case you missed it, Vanguard made 1800 ETFs no-commission on their brokerage platform last week.
And yes, I do think it puts a lot of pressure on the other brokerage firms.  And this has some really interesting ramifications.
3:09
If EVERYONE does this, then the whole business of paying brokers for shelf space (which happens now pretty much everywhere) goes away.
That removes an opaque cost from the system, and thats awesome.
but it makes it even harder for a small ETF issuer to get noticed
So in a sense, it still favors the "big guys" if the playing field is levelled.
To me the worst case scenario is where, like, half the brokers follow.
3:10
Now issuers could be incentivized to have multiple share classes, essentially -- different ETFs at different price points.
I think that's a nightmare, honestly, so fingers crossed.
Loc
3:10
What are your thoughts on using M1 Finance to buy and hold ETFs using the dollar cost average given an investment horizon of 30 years and $200 per month contributions? Thank you.
Dave Nadig
3:11
M1 is SUuuuper interesting. So they're basically a version of something like sharebuilder but with a few twists.
It's a brokerage, so you put money in, and instead of buying specific shares, you simply build a "pie" of what you want your portfolio to look like.  That can me 6 ETFs, or it could be 200 individual stocks.
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