The Meb Faber Show

In Episode 87, we welcome market veteran and ETF expert, Mike Venuto. Mike briefly walks us through his background, which includes a fun story about a baffling situation years ago when the gold mining company, Newmont Mining, was falling in price despite gold rising in price. Mike tells us the culprit turned out to be the new ETF “GLD” – Mike realized he needed to learn far more about ETFs. Next, the guys dive into ETFs. Meb starts broadly, asking where we are in the ETF evolution. Mike tells us we’re still quite early. The growth rate has been largely the same over the last 10 years (a little over 20%); but that growth rate is compounded over a larger base now, so it feels like the growth is greater. And in terms of where ETFs are going, free beta is getting saturated. The next move in ETFs will be people thoroughly detailing the differences between two ETFs that appear largely the same at first blush (nowadays, people tend to see similarly-themed ETFs as somewhat the same). Meb pushes deeper on this idea, w