Dear friends.
Day One consisted of a keynote address and the chance for a half dozen short one-on-one conversations.
The keynote address, by PIMCO's chief operating officer, Douglas Hodge, was nearly pointless. Part love song to the ETF ("you've democratized finance!") and part pedestrian droning (did you know that many people haven't saved enough for retirement, that the retirement stool has three legs and that asset class correlations spike during a crisis?), the most startling thing was how little PIMCO contributed to the talk. Mr. Hodge has access to some of the world's best fixed-income research and ended up giving the talk that any good financial planner would give one the first night of his "investing for the long term" seminar.
There is a conference website (eventmobi.com/ETFInvest) that reproduces the slides used and might offer video. If you're feeling philosophical, you might want to look at Mr. Hodge's slides on the relationship between national income and life expectancy. There are a series of twelve, by decade from 1900. As you might expect, there's a global trend toward rising life expectancy and there's a very clear relationship between wealth and life expectancy. Except in sub-Saharan Africa (the dark blue dots) where there seems to be no linkage between the two.
Curious.
I spoke with Jim Atkinson, president of Guinness Atkinson Funds. He volunteered that he was, for what interest it holds, really impressed with the consistently high level of understanding folks on the board show - and their broad-based civility in discourse. He's interested in arranging a talk between the London-based managers of GAINX and me.
Actively-managed ETFs are under 1% of all ETF assets; MINT is the largest of them. As a result, they're not much in evidence here but I'm spending some time trying to see how the ETF providers are thinking about them - and whether the folks at Morningstar have any insight into T. Rowe's plan to launch non-transparent active ETFs. I'll pass along what I learn.
David
p.s. funniest giveaway: FTSE ("footsie") is giving away little gray footie socks, the kind that don't come up to your ankle bond. We'll post a picture once the light is good enough to get a clear shot.
Comments
Lots of boosterism so far. There's a panel tomorrow on emerging markets investing, one topic of which is "can active managers add value in the emerging markets?" Three of the four panelists are index providers so I've got a guess as to the answer.
More soon,
David