ETFs offer investors a sophisticated tool to gain exposure to broad and targeted market segments covering a wide range of asset classes, equity market capitalizations, styles, and sectors. This enables investors to build or tailor customized investment portfolios consistent with their financial needs, risk tolerance, and investment horizon.
Strategic asset allocation is a target allocation of asset classes you expect to have in place for a long period of time. The target allocation is expected to remain the same and the portfolio is rebalanced to the original allocations when they deviate significantly from the initial settings due to differing returns from the various assets. Strategic asset allocation looks more at the overall risk objective of the portfolio, and therefore takes a long-term view.
Whether you’re looking to cover the broad global equity market, the total bond market, or take positions in specific countries, commodities or real estate, there’s likely an ETF — or ETFs — to help meet your objectives.
Tactical asset allocation is a short to intermediate-term view that looks for investment opportunities in the market. It allows investors to make real-time adjustments to their long-term asset allocation to take advantage of short-term tactical opportunities.
Tactical adjustments might include increasing allocations to markets and sectors that have become more attractive or decreasing exposures to less attractive ones. Investors can also easily reverse these tactical moves once the opportunities and risks have run their course. ETFs are an efficient tactical asset allocation tool as they offer intra-day trading at typically lower costs.
A core-satellite strategy seeks to replicate the broad market return in the core portion of a portfolio, and uses a satellite strategy to find alpha opportunities and add diversification using non-core market exposures.
Broad, market-based ETFs can be used as the core of an investment strategy. Sector, commodity-based, or other smart beta or active ETFs can be used to add a cost-effective satellite strategy to a portfolio to complement the core. This approach allows an investor to customize their exposure and risk to potentially enhance returns.
ETFs have democratized investing, giving individual investors the same access to investment solutions as institutional investors — at the same price. The ETF wrapper has opened new doors to:
ETFs offer expanded market exposures in a convenient, portable investment instrument.
There are several portfolio management options using ETFs:
The broad array of ETFs available today creates risk management approaches for individuals and smaller institutions that only large institutional investors could access previously.
ETFs can be easily employed to help investors minimize their tax consequences. ETFs are inherently tax efficient vehicles and can be used to harvest tax losses while potentially avoiding the impact of wash-sale rules.
When investors change asset managers, they’re often concerned with how to preserve equity exposure during the transition. One way to achieve this goal is to liquidate the portfolio and then re-invest the assets in an ETF with a high correlation to the benchmark of the active manager. Once a new manager is chosen, the investment professional can sell the ETF shares to fund the purchase of this exposure.