Skip to main content

The State Street ETF trading hub

Welcome to the State Street exchange traded fund (ETF) trading hub. Read about topics such as how ETFs trade, roles and responsibilities of each of the participants, trading decision tree, how to assess liquidity and more.

Need help with a trade efficient investor execution? Access our capital markets team expertise

State Street Investment Management has a dedicated ETF capital markets team that can provide independent consultation on sources of liquidity, trading counterparties and execution venues where specific knowledge is key to efficient investor execution.
The team can provide specific analytics to ensure investors are enabled to make informed decisions when evaluating or executing our ETFs.

Email the team or request a pre-trade analysis to make informed trading decisions.

Trading ETFs

Execution decision tree

When executing an ETF trade, there are many decisions to make in order to ensure that best execution is achieved. The table shows a summary of execution strategies.

Buying and selling an ETF: getting best execution

Execution strategy

Description

High urgency

Market impact sensitivity

Time risk

Anonymity

Risk trade

Client receives price for the entire trade at once, and the liquidity provider takes on the risk of managing the resulting position. Liquidity providers can be put in competition for the trade, allowing for a clear measure of best execution.

   

NAV trade

Trade executed by buying or selling the underlying basket of securities and subsequently creating/redeeming ETF shares. The client typically receives a price reflective of executions for the underlying basket of securities plus or minus creation/redemption costs. Client generally benchmarks vs. end of day NAV.

 

 

Agency

Electronic order types using automated, preprogrammed trading instructions. Orders can be measured relative to execution benchmarks based on volume, time or other metrics.

 

ETF liquidity

Liquidity is one of the most important features of ETFs, attracting a diverse group of market participants to the vehicle. Analysing ETFs requires a due diligence process that examines four basic aspects: price, index or strategy methodology, performance and liquidity.

The first three are largely intuitive. But when it comes to analysing liquidity, it can become more opaque and complex given the fragmented trading infrastructure across UCITS ETFs. Currently, trading in UCITS ETFs occurs across a wide spectrum of venues, both on-order book and off-order book markets, so it is important for an investor to consider the entire liquidity spectrum of an ETF when measuring the potential accessible liquidity. It is also important to note that average daily volume (ADV) does not measure the true liquidity available in an ETF. It is a simple measure of on-screen historical demand, not supply. The true liquidity of an ETF ultimately resides in its underlying securities.

Understanding the ETF liquidity spectrum

To understand where ETF liquidity comes from, it is key to explore the mechanics of ETF trading and the roles played by key members of the liquidity ecosystem.