- via Chris Flood at the FT
- "When the management of assets is on autopilot, as it is with ETFs, then investment trends can go to great excess,” said Oaktree Capital's Howard Marks recently."It is not clear where ETFs and index mutual funds will find buyers for their holdings if they have to sell in a crunch."
- ETF inflows through the end of July of $391B (according to ETFGI) have already surpassed the record $390B for all of 2016.
- Elliott Management's Paul Singer: Government manipulation of asset prices has "created the illusion that simply holding stocks and bonds in their index weights and sitting back, arms folded, is the perfect investment strategy ... What may have been a clever idea in its infancy has grown into a blob which is destructive to the growth-creating prospects of free-market capitalism.”
- Benefitting the most among the large asset managers have been BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) and Vanguard, which have hoovered up the vast majority of this fresh money. For BlackRock, its iShares unit has brought in $158.9B this year vs. $137.9B in all of 2016.
- Now read: BlackRock: The Ever-Growing Investment Giant
Original article