ETF means Exchange Traded Fund:– A form of investment fund that’s bought and sold on stock exchanges. ETFs usually seek to track the performance of a benchmark index, and hold assets that help them to do just that.

Exchange Traded Fund: are an increasing popular way of investing in the financial markets.

But what exactly are they?

Just like investment funds, ETFs are made up of a basket of related assets, such as equities, bonds, commodities or currencies. For example there are several ETFs designed to track performance of FTSE100, which means they hold shares in companies that make up the index in proportions that allow them to track the index as closely as possible.

There are also ETFs that track a particular sector, such as: energy, agriculture or healthcare or individual markets such as gold, oil or US Dollar.

How do you trade them?

As the name suggests, Exchange Traded Funds are traded on an exchange just like equities on the stock market. They are divided into shares which you can then buy or sell. Let’s say you are tracking an ETF trading the energy sector, instead of buying shares in individual energy companies, you’d be investing in their combined performance which gives you broad exposure to the overall sector with just a single transaction.

ETFs have several other benefits over standard investment funds like shares; they can be traded at any time during market hours and prices are updated continuously throughout the day.

It is also an extremely transparent way of investing as it is easy to see the assets the funds holds and how it’s performing.

ETFs also have lower cost compared to most other investment funds.

You have better flexibility to spread better trade CFDs on ETFs or buy and sell them directly to the stock broker account.
Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, are similar to mutual funds because both instruments bundle together securities to offer investors diversified portfolios. Typically anywhere from 100 to 3,000 different securities can make up a fund. Yet, the two investment types are marked by significant differences.

The Differences
ETFs trade throughout the trading day, like stocks, while mutual funds trade only at the end of the day at the net asset value (NAV) price. Most ETFs track a particular index and as a result have lower operating expenses than actively-invested mutual funds. Thus, ETFs may improve your rate of return on investments. In addition, ETFs have no investment minimums or sales loads, unlike traditional mutual funds, which often have both. Most indexed mutual funds, however, will not have sales loads.

Taxes and Rate of Return
ETFs create and redeem shares with in-kind transactions that are not considered sales. Thus, taxable events are not triggered. Redemptions create tax events in mutual funds, but they do not create tax events in ETFs. When a forced sale of stock occurs, mutual funds record and distribute higher levels of capital gains than ETFs.

In addition, ETFs have greater tax efficiency due to a structure that allows them to substantially decrease or avoid capital gains distributions altogether. This difference can greatly affect the overall rate of return, even if an ETF and mutual fund both track the identical index.