Trillions

By Bloomberg

What's Trillions about?

Money goes where it's treated best. That simple truth is a big reason why more and more money—trillions, in fact—flows into a powerful, low-cost tool that's quietly transformed investing in recent years. Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, let you invest in everything from the stock market to gold like never before. This biweekly podcast will demystify them—and delight you in the process.

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LAST EPISODE

The Bull Case for India

09.14.2023

India just hosted the G-20. Some of Apple’s latest iPhones are now being made there. The country’s demographics are compelling. And yet, as Hindenberg Research’s short of the Adani Group showed earlier this year, this emerging market is perhaps not ...

Trillions episodes:

09.14.2023 The Bull Case for India India just hosted the G-20. Some of Apple’s latest iPhones are now being made there. The country’s demographics are compelling. And yet, as Hindenberg Research’s short of the Adani Group showed earlier this year, this emerging market is perhaps not ...
08.31.2023 The Mutual Fund Is Very Much Alive and Well The death of mutual funds has been greatly exaggerated. With $24 trillion in assets, they outmatch exchange-traded funds two to one. And there’s good reason to keep tabs on them as well—especially because of what they reveal about active management. ...
08.17.2023 The Weird Burden of QQQ Invesco’s QQQ Trust Series 1, aka QQQ, is synonymous with tech investing—and performance, given that it’s nearly doubled the S&P; 500 over the last decade. But because the almost $200 billion exchange-traded fund was created as a unit investment trust, ...
08.03.2023 The No Downside ETF It sounds too good to be true. An exchange-traded fund that is 100% protected from any losses but still gets to participate in stock market gains? While there is a catch and a trade-off involved, that is pretty much what ...
07.20.2023 Five Things to Watch in ETFs During the Second Half It’s the third quarter and exchange-traded fund investors have finally gotten their FOMO bug back. While they’re currently plowing money into equities, how long can the good times last? This is just one of many trends to watch in the ...
07.06.2023 The Race for the Bitcoin ETF Heats Up Over the past decade, about 30 spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund applications have been swatted aside by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The outlook appeared dire. And then a surprise filing by BlackRock Inc. in mid-June seemed to change the ...
06.22.2023 ETF Lawyer-Regulator-Industry Veteran Dalia Blass Dalia Blass has a rare perspective on the exchange-traded fund industry. Now a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, she recently left BlackRock, where she was head of external affairs. Before that, Blass did multiple tours of duty with the US ...
06.08.2023 AI Mania Is Coming for ETFs Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard about how Artificial Intelligence is going to be a big deal. The exchange-traded fund industry is as excited as any other, and has launched a slew of funds dedicated to ...
05.25.2023 The FOMO Drought The S&P; 500 Index is up 9%, the Nasdaq 100 has jumped 25% and Bitcoin-mining stocks are up more than 100%—and yet no one seems to care. At least that’s the case among exchange-traded fund investors who have put virtually ...
05.11.2023 The $30 Trillion ETF Market Is Coming Exchange-traded funds could go from $9 trillion in global assets today to $30 trillion in the next decade as investors far and wide continue to migrate from mutual funds. This is the prediction that Brown Brothers Harriman reached in their ...
04.27.2023 The Hottest New Trade Is the Most Boring The hottest new trade is the most boring asset class: money market mutual funds. Once regarded as a no-yield option investors would only use to park cash in a crisis, they now yield more than 4.5%. In the first quarter ...
04.13.2023 The Lowdown on Increasing Your ‘ETF IQ’ The first exchange-traded fund television show ever created, Bloomberg’s ETF IQ, just finished its first year on the air. On this episode, we talk to its anchors, Matt Miller and Katie Greifeld, about what goes into making the program, some ...
03.30.2023 The Aftermath of Another Banking Mess, This Time in Europe UBS recently acquired its troubled neighbor, Credit Suisse, creating a Swiss megabank. How it all went down led to an avalanche of headlines, with a few interesting angles for investors in things such as exchange-traded notes and CoCo bonds. On ...
03.16.2023 The Situation With Midsize Banks In barely a week, three banks a lot of people had never heard of—Silvergate, Silicon Valley and Signature—suddenly became toast. The US government found itself playing backstop to prevent an escalation as whipsawed investors hoped the worst was over. But ...
03.02.2023 This ETF Is Betting Against Jim Cramer’s Picks Jim Cramer—the host of Mad Money on CNBC—makes a lot of investing calls. It’s part of his shtick. And as you can easily divine from social media, not all of them pan out. The new Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF (SJIM), ...
02.16.2023 Exchanging Exchanges at Exchange The Exchange ETF Conference was recently held in Miami Beach with more than 1,000 people in attendance. While the gathering was as popular as ever and networking in full bloom, the vibe was a little more subdued—likely a reflection the ...
02.02.2023 Are ETFs Killing Future Stock Market Returns? The rise of index funds, exchange-traded funds and passive investing in recent years has been nothing short of momentous, as investors across the US and around the world learn to rely on slow-and-steady returns. But there’s been rising concern over ...
01.29.2023 The ETF Story 6: The Revolution SPY wasn’t just a hit product, it was an inspiration for an entire industry to take off. But it didn’t happen overnight. It took about 10 years for the ETF structure to be utilized for other asset classes and strategies, ...
01.29.2023 The ETF Story 5: The Sleeper SPDR S&P; 500, or SPY, is the world’s largest ETF today with about $240 billion in assets, but it wasn’t much to look at when it debuted in 1993. Some days it was on “volume life support,” trading as little ...
01.29.2023 The ETF Story 4: The Competition Just as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak weren’t the only two geeks in a garage working on a computer in the 1970s, the AMEX wasn’t the only exchange looking to get a market basket instrument listed. The late 1980s saw ...
01.29.2023 The ETF Story 3: The Approval When the SPDR S&P; 500 Trust (SPY) was submitted to the SEC in 1988, George Michael’s "Faith" was the No. 1 song and Magic Johnson led the Lakers to another NBA Championship. By the time SPY finally launched in 1993, ...
01.29.2023 The ETF Story 2: The Report Government reports are known more for curing insomnia than providing inspiration for revolutionary products. The October 1987 Market Break Report might be an exception. A paragraph deep in the SEC's 800-page white paper happened to outline a “product” for trading ...
01.29.2023 The ETF Story 1: The Crash Thirty years ago today, the very first exchange-traded fund started trading on the American Stock Exchange. At the time, Bill Clinton had just moved into the White House and America was trying on a new role as the world's lone ...
01.19.2023 Meet One of ETF’s Founding Fathers This month marks the 30th birthday of the SPDR S&P; 500 ETF Trust (SPY), the granddaddy ETF that started it all and is still the largest and most-traded ETF in the world. But getting this ETF launched was no small ...
01.05.2023 23 ETFs for 2023 From inflation and the Federal Reserve, China and Russia, fundamentals and Bitcoin, there’s no shortage of themes for investors to think about in 2023. And while we can’t give you investing advice, we can give you a few tickers to ...
01.04.2023 Introducing: Crash Course Hosted by Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O'Brien, Crash Course will bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic business and social upheavals occur. Every week, Crash Course will explore the lessons to be learned when creativity and ambition ...
12.22.2022 Now There Are One-Stop Shops to Launch Your ETF Got an idea for an exchange-traded fund but don’t want to deal with the logistics? A group of “white label” ETF issuers are in the business of helping people launch their own fund—and business is booming. These issuers have minted ...
12.08.2022 The ETF Era Is Going to Be Here for a While The future is very bright for ETFs, which in 2022 saw record volume and the second most flows and new launches—all astounding numbers considering the stock and bond markets were in the gutter return-wise. So what can we expect next ...
11.24.2022 What the Crypto Crash Means for ETFs The crypto market may not be dead, but it’s arguably in a temporary coma thanks to the spectacular implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. The bankrupt crypto exchange, with billions of dollars of customer funds allegedly missing, has spooked all but ...
11.10.2022 Alternative ETFs Finally Get Their Moment in the Sun It took 15 years for an ideal environment to arrive for alternative exchange-traded funds—which employ or mimic hedge fund strategies—but their moment has finally come. They’ve grown assets by 25% this year as investors look for something to help offset ...
10.27.2022 The ETF Graveyard Every year there's far more ETF launches than closures. But market headwinds are starting to accelerate the number of liquidations. So far this year the Grim Reaper has already come for about 100 ETFs. On this episode of Trillions—just in ...
10.13.2022 KPOP’s Hit Factory Comes to Investing South Korea is having a moment. Between the stellar rise of K-pop and worldwide film hits such as Parasite and Squid Game, the country has established itself as a power to be reckoned with when it comes to global entertainment. ...
09.29.2022 Cash Is Still King Boring is beautiful this year as investors rush to the relative safety (and higher yields) of exchange-traded funds that hold short-term treasuries. But what exactly is inside them? And what are the risk-rewards of the most popular ones? On this ...
09.15.2022 The Active vs Passive Scorecard Active managers have, historically, had a tough time beating their benchmarks. Yet this year may prove to be an exception; nearly half of large-cap managers are outperforming. Can they keep it up? And can anything really reverse the massive migration ...
09.01.2022 The Case for Custom Indexing A new approach to investing called direct or custom indexing effectively lets investors own stocks but with some special enhancements, such as capturing tax alpha. In other words, you get some of an ETF's charm without the ETF. For investors ...
08.18.2022 Fedsplaining with Ira Jersey Inflation. Unemployment. Consumer demand. All important economic data—but more important is how the Federal Reserve interprets it all and reacts. The central bank wields an especially powerful influence over markets, so understanding how its members think, what they are doing ...
08.04.2022 Protecting Your Portfolio From Black Swans In investing, a black swan event is something almost nobody sees coming—and to make a bet on the outcome of that unforeseen event has always been expensive and complicated. Inflation upending the market over the past year, and the Federal ...
07.21.2022 The Single-Stock ETF Era Is Born A single-stock ETF might sound like an oxymoron, but it's about to become a massive new category. These ETFs, which aim to serve up inverse and leveraged exposure to single stocks, are already a thing in Europe—and now they've come ...
07.07.2022 Now There Are ETFs Making Money While You Sleep Just when you think the world of exchange-traded funds has run out of new ideas, along comes something truly novel. Instead of slicing the market up into themes, geographies or strategies, these are dividing by time. The new ETFs are ...
06.23.2022 High-Dividend ETFs Are Having a Moment When markets plummet like they have this year, investors want to grab onto something—anything—that isn’t in free-fall. High-dividend exchange-traded funds, with their exposures to the energy and utilities sectors, have emerged as a rare bright spot, or at least a ...
06.09.2022 Just Keep Buying Investing in stock and bond markets during a boring, decade-long bull market is easy enough. It’s a little more difficult when everything is trending downward, inflation is at record highs and even Cardi B is tweeting about recession jitters. And ...
05.26.2022 The Psychology of a Selloff Unlike most declines, stocks and bonds have been sinking together so far this year. Rising inflation and a hawkish U.S. Federal Reserve are providing little comfort to investors. And yet ETFs continue to see massive flows. Eric and Joel speak ...
05.12.2022 The ESG Backlash BlackRock and Vanguard collectively own about 15% of every US company, but are they voting their shares in a way that aligns with investors in their funds? One new exchange-traded fund company, Strive Asset Management, says they aren’t, claiming they’ve ...
04.28.2022 Inside "The Bogle Effect" Three years ago, Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas and Joel Weber went to Jack Bogle’s office in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and recorded an episode of Trillions. That chat helped inspire Balchunas’s new book, “The Bogle Effect,” about the Vanguard founder’s influence on investing ...
04.14.2022 The Great Emerging Markets Debate This past year has reminded everyone why they’re called “emerging” markets. But it’s gone further this time, with investors questioning whether they even want to own anything in countries ruled by authoritarian governments, such as those in Russia and China. ...
03.31.2022 Words of Wisdom From Mr. ETF Nobody deserves the nickname Mr. ETF as much as Reggie Browne, principal of GTS and a renowned market maker. He's had an amazing behind-the-scenes vantage these past few decades because almost everyone launching a new ETF comes to ask for ...
03.17.2022 When ETFs Stop Working If ETFs were living creatures, they might be cockroaches—they can survive almost anything. And yet Russia's invasion of Ukraine has presented a rare test. The VanEck Russia ETF, or $RSX, has seen its trading halted; the product holds shares of ...
03.03.2022 How Long Will the Commodities Boom Last? One of the best-performing categories since the beginning of last year has been commodities. Everything from oil to wheat to palladium to gold is up, due in large part to inflation worries. But how much room is there left to ...
02.17.2022 When a Soccer Mom Tells You About Bitcoin Mining... Everybody has a friend (or three) who's gone "full crypto." So Joel’s ears perked up when a friend from high school and college, Char Boger, told him about her interest not in Bitcoin — the more common refrain — so ...
02.03.2022 Your Guide to the 2022 Market Roller Coaster It looks like the "easy money" days of the last two years may soon end as the Federal Reserve readies to raise interest rates and fight inflation. Markets are already off to a rocky start; monitoring ETF flows shows how ...

Older episodes

Trillions

What's Trillions about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Trillions episodes:

The Bull Case for India

The Mutual Fund Is Very Much Alive and Well

The Weird Burden of QQQ

The No Downside ETF

Five Things to Watch in ETFs During the Second Half

The Race for the Bitcoin ETF Heats Up

ETF Lawyer-Regulator-Industry Veteran Dalia Blass

AI Mania Is Coming for ETFs

The FOMO Drought

The $30 Trillion ETF Market Is Coming

The Hottest New Trade Is the Most Boring

The Lowdown on Increasing Your ‘ETF IQ’

The Aftermath of Another Banking Mess, This Time in Europe

The Situation With Midsize Banks

This ETF Is Betting Against Jim Cramer’s Picks

Exchanging Exchanges at Exchange

Are ETFs Killing Future Stock Market Returns?

The ETF Story 6: The Revolution

The ETF Story 5: The Sleeper

The ETF Story 4: The Competition

The ETF Story 3: The Approval

The ETF Story 2: The Report

The ETF Story 1: The Crash

Meet One of ETF’s Founding Fathers

23 ETFs for 2023

Introducing: Crash Course

Now There Are One-Stop Shops to Launch Your ETF

The ETF Era Is Going to Be Here for a While

What the Crypto Crash Means for ETFs

Alternative ETFs Finally Get Their Moment in the Sun

The ETF Graveyard

KPOP’s Hit Factory Comes to Investing

Cash Is Still King

The Active vs Passive Scorecard

The Case for Custom Indexing

Fedsplaining with Ira Jersey

Protecting Your Portfolio From Black Swans

The Single-Stock ETF Era Is Born

Now There Are ETFs Making Money While You Sleep

High-Dividend ETFs Are Having a Moment

Just Keep Buying

The Psychology of a Selloff

The ESG Backlash

Inside "The Bogle Effect"

The Great Emerging Markets Debate

Words of Wisdom From Mr. ETF

When ETFs Stop Working

How Long Will the Commodities Boom Last?

When a Soccer Mom Tells You About Bitcoin Mining...

Your Guide to the 2022 Market Roller Coaster