Tag Archives: net asset value

bond etf liquidity

Calling for Clarity: Corporate Bond ETF Liquidity

There continues to be a call for clarity with regard to the topic of corporate bond ETF liquidity and where/how corporate bond ETFs add or detract within the context of investors ability to get ‘best execution’ when secondary market trade in underlying corporate bonds is increasingly ‘illiquid.’

This not only a big agenda item for the SEC to wrap their arms around, it is a challenge for “market experts” to frame in a manner that resonates with even the most knowledgeable bond market players.

MarketsMuse curators noticed that ETF market guru Dave Nadig penned a piece for ETF.com last night “How Illiquid are Bond ETFs, Really?” that helps to distill the discussion elements in a manner that even regulators can understand.. Without  further ado, below is the opening extract..

“Transcendent liquidity” is a somewhat silly-sounding phrase coined by the equally silly Matt Hougan, CEO of ETF.com, to discuss the odd situation in fixed-income ETFs—specifically, fixed-income ETFs tracking narrow corners of the market like high-yield bonds.

But it’s increasingly the focus of regulators and skeptical investors like Carl Icahn. Simply put: Flagship funds like the iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG | B-68) trade like water, while their underlying holdings don’t. Is this a real problem, or a unicorn?

Defining Liquidity

The problem with even analyzing this question starts with definitions. When most people talk about ETF liquidity, they’re actually conflating two different things: tradability and fairness.

Tradability is actually a pretty simple concept: How well will the market let me get in or out of an ETF? And for narrow fixed-income ETFs (I’m limiting myself to corporates, in this analysis), most investors should be paying attention to the fairly obvious metrics, e.g., things like median daily dollar volume and time-weighted average spreads. By these metrics, a fund like HYG looks like the easiest thing to trade ever:

On a value basis, the average spread for HYG on a bad day of the past year is under 2 basis points. It’s consistently a penny wide on a handle around $80, with nearly $1 billion changing hands on most days. That puts it among the most liquid securities in the world. And that easy liquidity is precisely what has the SEC—and some investors—concerned.

Fairness

But that’s tradability, not fairness. Fairness is a unique concept to ETF trading. We don’t talk about whether the execution you got in Apple was “fair.” You might get a poor execution, or you might sell on a dip, but there’s no question that your properly settled trade in Apple is “fair.”

In an ETF, however, there is an inherent “fair” price—the net asset value of the ETF at the time you trade it—intraday NAV or iNAV. If the ETF only holds Apple and Microsoft, that fair price is easy to calculate, and is in fact disseminated every 15 seconds by the exchange.

But when the underlying securities are illiquid for some reason (hard to value, time-zone disconnects or just obscure), assessing the “fair” price becomes difficult, if not impossible.

If the securities in the ETF are all listed in Tokyo, then your execution at noon in New York will necessarily not be exactly the NAV of the ETF, because none of those holdings is currently trading.

Premiums & Discounts

In the case of something like corporate bonds, the issue isn’t one of time zone, it’s one of market structure. Corporate bonds are an over-the-counter, dealer-based market. That means the iNAV of a fund like HYG is based not on the last trade for each bond it holds (which could literally be days old), but on a pricing services estimate of how much each bond is worth. That leads to the appearance of premiums or discounts that swing to +/- 1%.

To read the full article, please click here

ETF Pricing Glitch Rattles BNY; SunGard Software Snafu

When it rains it pours. While many ETF investors have been sucker-punched while trying to execute orders during the past several highly volatile days, MarketsMuse finds that a second shoe dropped Monday on the heads of thousands of BNY Mellon customers thanks to a software snafu attributed to market data vendor SunGard systems. The “computer glitch” has impacted the Net Asset Value (NAV) pricing for nearly 800 exchange-traded funds and mutual funds administered by BNY, the world’s largest custodian.

According to the Wall Street Journal, BNY Mellon raised the alarm with regulators and held emergency calls with customers to try and resolve the problem.The system, known as InvestOne and run by financial software provider SunGard, resumed with limited capacity on Tuesday but was still not fully operational on Wednesday, leaving BNY Mellon with a backlog of funds to price.

sungard glitch1Morningstar, Inc., the fund research firm said that 796 funds were missing their net asset values on Wednesday, including ETFs operated by Goldman Sachs, Guggenheim Partners and several dozen mutual funds sold by Federated Investors. Invesco PowerShares Capital Management had 11 ETFs affected by the glitch, a spokeswoman said.

BNY Mellon said it was able to construct Monday net asset values (NAVs) for all affected funds. But there remains a backlog of Tuesday NAVs that still need to be generated.

The problems with calculating the net asset value of ETFs could raise trading costs for investors, said Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF and mutual-fund research at S&P Capital IQ.

Several traders said they were forced to calculate their own net asset value for ETFs and that they widened the spreads, or the difference, between listed buying and selling prices to accommodate for the higher risk of trading.

“We measure our edge in terms of subpennies,” one trader said. “We can’t afford to be off by a penny.”

Early in the week, BNY Mellon notified regulators and U.S. stock exchanges about the issue. The Securities and Exchange Commission is monitoring the situation, an SEC official said.

“No one here can understand why it’s not up and running yet,” said one executive at a firm that was affected.

For the full coverage by the WSJ, please click here