Trillions

No one person has had a bigger impact on the fund industry than Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, the legendary investor who invented indexing and popularized low-fee mutual funds. One of Vanguard's biggest advantages: Its mutual fund ownership structure, which is an original Bogle breakthrough.

Bogle now thinks other firms will have to follow suit to survive in the future -- one of a few topics he plans to explore in his next book, Stay the Course: The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution (Wiley, October 2018). If he's right, the financial ecosystem is in for major changes.

During their visit to Vanguard, Joel and Eric also picked Bogle's brain on ETFs, financial advisors, active share, behavior, and Bitcoin for this special episode of Trillions.

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ETF flows are one of the best ways to get inside the mind of investors. They tell you which asset classes, sectors, strategies and specific ETFs both traders and long-term investors are favoring. But interpreting flows is as much art as science. On this week’s Trillions, Joel and Eric are joined by Todd Rosenbluth of CFRA to dissect ETF inflows and outflows from the first half of what is at once both a typical and atypical year.

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There are over 120 U.S. ETF issuers, but only one has more than $1 trillion in assets, over 300 products and knows what it is like to beat Vanguard: BlackRock. The asset manager made the equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase when it acquired iShares from Barclays in 2009, a move that has made them the most dominant player in the industry. Joel and Eric interview Martin Small, head of U.S. iShares, about ETFs, investing and his insatiable appetite for guitars. 

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In this special report, Rachel Evans interviews Hal Lambert, the creator of the MAGA ETF, to learn how he turned his idea for the fund into a reality. The episode examines his strategy—buying companies that donate to the Republican Party—how this contrasts with other values-based products, and whether ads on conservative talk shows will translate into investor dollars. 

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It’s a big, expensive, global mystery. Why do women still make less money—a lot less—than men? In the US, the average woman makes 80 cents to every dollar a man makes. Launching May 9, the Pay Check is an in-depth investigation into what that 20 percent difference looks like. In this miniseries we'll show you how the gender pay gap plays out in real life. We'll hear from Lily Ledbetter, Mo’Nique, and a lot of other women who weren’t happy to be paid less. We'll find out what happens when a whole country tries to tackle the pay gap. And we'll talk to some women who are taking things into their own hands.

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Smart-beta is one of the hottest trends in not just ETFs but all of investment management. Assets in the category have grown from $0 to almost $1 trillion in barely a decade. But what is it, exactly? 

On this week’s Trillions, Joel and Eric explore the mysteries of smart-beta. To some, it's all a mutation of passive indexing; to others, it's a better, cheaper version of active management. "Imagine R2D2 with the head of Peter Lynch," says Eric. 

And to help you understand how investors can use the products, Nir Kaissar, a Bloomberg Gadfly columnist and financial advisor, and Tom Psarofagis, an ETF analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence and former issuer of smart-beta ETFs, join to offer their perspectives.

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While the very largest ETFs attract the bulk of flows, a few smaller products manage to beat the odds and emerge from obscurity each year to capture investors' imagination and assets. Over the past year, growth in robotics, the Internet and China have led to outsized investments into smaller ETFs. 

On this week's Trillions, Joel and Eric highlight and analyze up-and-comer ETFs of the past, present and future. They are joined by Bloomberg News' Carolina Wilson on a mission to find the next big things in ETF Land.

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Tickers are special. Not only can they catch our eye, they also tell a story. Some ETF tickers are especially great -- take MOO, for instance, or TAN. But with hundreds of them cluttering the stock market, you sort of have to wonder: Which ETF ticker is the very best? On this episode of Trillions, Joel and Eric harness the spirit of March Madness with a team of Bloomberg News reporters and create a tournament bracket to determine the champion. Chaos ensues -- but one ticker gets crowned the winner.

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What happens when ETF nerds/Radiohead superfans take over the podcast? You get the Radiohead Guide to Good ETF Investing. Trillions goes full prog rock this week as Joel and Eric are joined by Bloomberg reporter Rachel Evans for a dive into the band's ground-breaking catalog and the hidden ETF Investing advice contained in it. 

Does your ETF portfolio put Everything in Its Right Place or is it filled with Fake Plastic Trees? Are you Optimistic enough to let your portfolio grow Little By Little? These are just some of the Radiohead-inspired questions that get answered in the name of accessible ETF education. 

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