How To Avoid The Worst Style ETFs 3Q23

Question: Why are there so many ETFs?

Answer: ETF issuance is profitable, so Wall Street keeps cranking out more products to sell.

I leverage proprietary data to identify three red flags you can use to avoid the worst ETFs:

1. Inadequate Liquidity

This issue is the easiest to avoid, and my advice is simple. Avoid all ETFs with less than $100 million in assets. Low levels of liquidity can lead to a discrepancy between the price of the ETF and the underlying value of the securities it holds. Small ETFs also generally have lower trading volume, which translates to higher trading costs via larger bid-ask spreads.

2. High Fees

ETFs should be cheap, but not all of them are. The first step is to benchmark what cheap means.

To ensure you are paying at or below average fees, invest only in ETFs with total annual costs below 0.48%, – the average total annual cost of the 748 U.S. equity Style ETFs my firm covers. The weighted average is lower at 0.14%, which highlights how investors tend to put their money in ETFs with low fees.

Figure 1 shows InfraCap Equity Income Fund ETF (ICAP) is the most expensive style ETF and JPMorgan BetaBuilders U.S. Equity Fund (
BBUS
) is the least expensive. Absolute Shares Trust (
WBIF
,
WBIG
) provides two of the most expensive ETFs while iShares Trust (
VTI
, ITOT) ETFs are among the cheapest.

Figure 1: 5 Most and Least Expensive Style ETFs

Investors need not pay high fees for quality holdings. Alpha Architect U.S. Quantitative Value ETF
QVAL
is the best ranked style ETF overall. QVAL’s very attractive Portfolio Management rating and 0.43% total annual cost earns it a very attractive rating.

On the other hand, iShares Morningstar Small-Cap ETF (ISCB) holds poor stocks and earns an unattractive rating, despite having low total annual costs of 0.04%. No matter how cheap an ETF looks, if it holds bad stocks, its performance will be bad. The quality of an ETF’s holdings matters more than its management fee.

3. Poor Holdings

Avoiding poor holdings is by far the hardest part of avoiding bad ETFs, but it is also the most important because an ETFs performance is determined more by its holdings than its costs. Figure 2 shows the ETFs within each style with the worst portfolio management ratings, a function of the fund’s holdings.

Figure 2: Style ETFs with the Worst Holdings

Nuveen (
NUMG
, NUMV) appear more often than any other providers in Figure 2, which means that they offer the most ETFs with the worst holdings.

BlackRock Future Innovators ETF (BFTR) is the worst rated ETF in Figure 2 based on my predictive overall rating. Direxion Daily Real Estate Bull 3X Shares (DRN), BNY Mellon Innovators ETF (BKIV), Roundhill MEME ETF (MEME), IQ U.S. Mid Cap R&D Leaders ETF (MRND), and Hoya Capital High Dividend Yield ETF (RIET) also earn a very unattractive predictive overall rating, which means not only do they hold poor stocks, they charge high total annual costs.

The Danger Within

Buying an ETF without analyzing its holdings is like buying a stock without analyzing its business model and finances. Put another way, research on ETF holdings is necessary due diligence because an ETF’s performance is only as good as its holdings.

PERFORMANCE OF ETFs HOLDINGs – FEES = PERFORMANCE OF ETF

Disclosure: David Trainer, Kyle Guske II, Italo Mendonça, and Hakan Salt receive no compensation to write about any specific stock, style, or theme.