Not a comment about ETFs, but in general, the word "foolish" applies to someone entering the scheme, not someone running the scheme. And as is the way of humans, there are always enough people willing to be misled into bad decisions. In that sense, these schemes are very smart.
To repeat, this is NOT a comment about ETFs; it's only about where the word "foolish" goes.
In all fairness, this isn't much different from commodity ETFs promising that they have a warehouse of gold or silver somewhere that matches the market cap of the fund. There's no easy way to completely, 100% verify this, so people just trust them.
ETFs are stupid. You are blindly buying a stock based on it's capitalization. This defeats the purpose of the market, which is to crowd source the balancing of supply & demand.
ETFs create a pyramid scheme out of the market. It will work for a while, but near the top you better get your money out. At some point others will. These days, with computer trading, that 40% drop may happen faster than 100 ms.
Oh, I've seen those. They're a limited selection of ETFs/Mutual Funds though. I thought you were referring to brokers who had unlimited free ETF trading.
I'm still skeptical of ETFs as I see them as being a derivative product - not trading the original shares, but tickets representing them. So I see the same dangers/risks with them as with mortgage-backed securities.
While I may be acting like an old fuddy-duddy, there is this:
>Of the 1,278 securities halted for trading, 80 percent involved ETFs, according to the SEC.
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