Photo Credit: Steve @ the alligator farm

Recently in a tweet, I said:

Index Fund Investment Strategy: Michael Burry Warns of Bubble @Bloomberg https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-04/michael-burry-explains-why-index-funds-are-like-subprime-cdos? The most this would do is increase the correlation of the movements. Unit creation & liquidation serve the same role as futures arbitrage programs that have existed since the mid-80s

https://twitter.com/AlephBlog/status/1179927420884983809

I am not in the crowd that thinks that indexing or ETFs will create a crisis. As I have said before, long-term performance of assets relies on the underlying productivity of the businesses issuing the assets. Short-term performance is also affected by the behavior of secondary market traders, but those effects get eventually washed out by the underlying productivity of the businesses issuing the assets.

And there you have it in slightly different garb: Ben Graham’s weighing machine versus the voting machine. The voting machine is transitory. The weighing machine is permanent. After all, think of a private business — it only has the weighing machine, and it does well enough producing cash flow for the owners, creditors, etc., without the sideshow of the price of its stock and bonds being publicly estimated each day.

In this case, the voting machine has people buying and selling bundles of stocks. But what does that replace? People owning equivalent amounts of individual stocks. People have varying propensities toward panic and greed. Those who would have sold their stocks in a panic or bought stocks in a bullish frenzy will do the same with the ETFs that they hold. It will be the same amount of selling pressure in aggregate.

Now, it is possible that some stocks are misrepresented in the ETFs in which they reside. My favorite example is refiners in the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE) . The economics of most stocks in XLE are positively geared off of crude oil and natural gas prices. Refiners, unless they are gambling on their hedges, usually don’t hedge fully, and the economics are negatively geared to energy prices. Ever since XLE became popular, the refiners often trade in tandem in the short run with the rest of the Energy stock complex.

So what happens? Refiners then correct after a bull run of energy prices when their earnings don’t reflect the stock price. Vice-versa for positive earnings surprises in a bear phase for energy prices.

Summary

ETFs do present some anomalies for the markets, but they are localized to the sectors or strategies that are being pursued. For the market as a whole, they are simply pass-through vehicles that have little to no macro effects, aside from increasing short-run price correlation between stocks in the largest ETFs.