Are ETFs Cheaper? By Scot Blythe
As ETF assets grow, there is pressure to reinvent the wheel. It’s natural because many investors don’t want just beta. They may want dividends; they may want low volatility; they may want enhanced indexing. There is, for example, now a covered-call ETF on BRIC countries. But these add-ons come at a cost. And that cost means that ETFs are not necessarily cheaper than mutual funds—at least in the U.S. …