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Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

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401–410 of 434 posts

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#401

Ummm, have y'all thought about spread costs? If you look at the spread of any of these ETF's mentioned (spread = ask px - bid px), you will notice that the spread is much smaller than if you were to sum up the spreads of each component stock. That's possible because of a mature ecosystem of ETF market makers and arbitrageurs (like Jane Street). If you buy all of the stocks individually, as it sounds like y'all's solu…

I’d like an answer to this question as well.

Can someone honestly explain the downvotes for agreeing with a commenter that I’d like to understand how they handle the spread issue?

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#402
How does running index funds with 0% expense ratios differ from running diversified 401(k) funds?

Gusto payroll data can be synced with Guideline, which offers various 401(k) and IRA plans.

Are there All Weather or Golden Butterfly index funds?

Which well known index funds are weighted and which aren't? (This is probably not common knowledge, and might be useful for your pitch)

Given that you can't buy fractional shares, how and when are weighted indexes rebalanced to maintain the initial weight?

Like most funds, the S&P 500 index demonstrates Survivorship bias: underperformers are removed from the index, which thus is not a good indicator of total market performance over time.

From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe... :

> Buffett's ultimately successful contention was that, including fees, costs and expenses, an S&P 500 index fund would outperform a hand-picked portfolio of hedge funds over 10 years. The bet pit two basic investing philosophies against each other: passive and active investing.

It's common for (cryptoasset) backtesting to have the S&P 500 as a benchmark. Weighted by market cap, the S&P 500 may or may not have higher returns than cryptoassets (for which there were not ETFs for so long).

Do you offer index fund backtesting; or, which performance and relative cost savings metrics do you track for each index fund?

How would a hypothetical index fund have performed during stress events, corrections, drawdowns, flash crashes, stress testing scenarios, and recessions; according to backtesting?

Do you offer fundamentals data?

Do you offer [GRI] sustainability report data to support portfolio/fund design?

Do you offer funds or index fund design with an emphasis on sustainability and responsible investing?

Can I generate an index fund to focus on one or more Sustainable Development Goals?

What is the difference between creating an index fund with you as compared with holding stocks in a portfolio and periodically rebalancing and reassessing?

IIUC in terms of cryptoassets:

- A (weighted and rebalanced) index fund is a collection of tokens.

- Each constituent stock or ETF could or may already be tokenized as a cryptoasset.

- A token is a string identifier for an asset. A token is a smart contract that has the necessary methods (satisfies the smart contract functional interface) to be exchanged over a cryptoasset network with cryptographic assurances.

- A "wrapped token" is wrapped to be listed on a different network. So, for example, if someone wanted to sell NASDAQ:AAPL on a different exchange or cryptoasset network they would need to wrap it and commit to an approved, on-file ETF fund management commitment that specifies how quickly they intend to buy or sell to keep the wrapped asset price close to the original asset's before-after-hours-trading market price.

- (ETFs typically have low to no fees. When you own an ETF you do not own voting shares; with ETFs, the fund owns the voting shares and votes on behalf of the ETF holders).

There are EIP and ERC standard specifications for bundles of assets; a token composed of multiple other tokens. A wallet may contain various types of fungible and non-fungible tokens. For wallet recovery and inheritance and estate planning, there's SSS, multisig transactions, multiple signature smart contracts, and Shamir backup, and banks can now legally hold cryptoassets for clients.

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#403

Ummm, have y'all thought about spread costs? If you look at the spread of any of these ETF's mentioned (spread = ask px - bid px), you will notice that the spread is much smaller than if you were to sum up the spreads of each component stock. That's possible because of a mature ecosystem of ETF market makers and arbitrageurs (like Jane Street). If you buy all of the stocks individually, as it sounds like y'all's solu…

I just found this while researching for my other comment in this thread; re: "Fund of Funds Investment Agreements",

Would Rule 12d1-4 (2020) apply to holding funds versus holding individual stocks and/or ETFs? What about the 75-5-10 rule for mutual funds?

From https://www.klgates.com/SEC-Adopts-New-Rule-12d1-4-Overhauli... :

> Rule 12d1-4 will prohibit an acquiring fund and its “advisory group” from controlling, individually or in the aggregate, an acquired fund, except for an acquiring fund: (1) in the same fund group as the acquired fund; or (2) with a sub-adviser that also acts as adviser to the acquired fund. [4] Rule 12d1-4 requires an acquiring fund to aggregate its investment in an acquired fund with the investment of the acquiring fund’s advisory group to assess control

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#405
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This example is apples to oranges Imagine you are a market maker: you offer 2 APIs. The first, you allow anyone to trade on. The second, you only allow traders who are doing less than 100k in volume per day (and don't allow users to have multiple accounts) Which API are you able to offer tighter bid/ask spreads on? Why? That's the point. Pfof is saying: the second API is so valuable to me that I'm willing to pay to o…

PFOF does two things and you're only focusing on half of it. 1. It segments the counterparty they trade with. 2. They get dibs on new orders arriving. You're only talking about 1. I'm talking about 2. 1 is also bad because this segmentation also gives them inforamtion no-one else can get. But the chain of reasoning to concretely show why its bad (for someone getting their orders PFOF'd) is less obvious and longer. >…

I'm not sure what to say. Your arguments are extremely hypothetical and there's no evidence of the claimed badness today.

I don't find them convincing - why is it bad that someone paying for exclusive access to data gets exclusive access to that data? There are so many exclusive data vendors in financial markets, this one seems relatively low value

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#406

You're coming into a market where most providers make much more money, and you're undercutting and selling for $1/month. $1/month is below even most cheap B2C services, and many customers are likely to want a product like this to manage a large number of assets. With what other product, service, arbitrage, float, or other mechanism do you intend to make more substantial amounts of money? Knowing what this is would he…

I'd also like to know that! I have some ideas, from less shady to more: - Payment for order flow - Interest on sweep accounts - Upsell to more profitable products (first party ads) - Payment for order flow, but structure your orders so the spread is really attractive to market makers (unfortunately you might be doing this unintentionally) - Third party ads - Sell your customers' data There's also the possibility of n…

I’d think some combination of all of the above, but would love to know how valuable the order flow is from an indexer – it’s gotta be worth way less than from, e.g., Robinhood right?

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#407

Ummm, have y'all thought about spread costs? If you look at the spread of any of these ETF's mentioned (spread = ask px - bid px), you will notice that the spread is much smaller than if you were to sum up the spreads of each component stock. That's possible because of a mature ecosystem of ETF market makers and arbitrageurs (like Jane Street). If you buy all of the stocks individually, as it sounds like y'all's solu…

Also former HFT / market maker here (UBS, GETCO), and also the developer who wrote Wealthfront's direct indexing with tax loss harvesting 10 years ago.

I had that same skepticism before I built it. Using a Bloomberg terminal back then, my conclusion was that the weighted spread for the S&P 500 was 3.2 bps, vs. 0.6 bps for SPY.And this was > 10 years ago, so I'd think by now it would be even tigher. The ratio may have changed, but who cares? It's like saying that rice got more expensive at the supermarket - it's already so cheap that it doesn't matter.

With tax loss harvesting specifically, each order typically has a threshold, so that you only trade when the projected tax benefit is a large multiple of the transaction cost.

Also, I'm sure this is obvious to you if you work in market making, but for others reading this: the spread costs aren't additive (re: 'every. single. stock'). If you have 500 stocks, each with 2 bps round-trip spread cost, but each is at e.g. 1 / 500 = 20 bps, then the weighted spread for the entire basket is 2 * 500 * 1 / 500 = 2 bps. It's not 2 * 500 = 1000 bps. The main question then is - how much tighter are spreads for ETFs than for the average stock? And, since bigger stocks (AAPL, NVDA etc.) will have tighter spreads than smaller index constituents, the weighted average will be even lower.

Here's my blog post:

https://eng.wealthfront.com/2014/03/04/marketside-chats-4-co...

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like an answer to this question as well.

Can someone honestly explain the downvotes for agreeing with a commenter that I’d like to understand how they handle the spread issue?

Likely due to the guidelines[1]

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

your comment didn't add anything of value to the thread. Upvoting will cause the thread to float higher in the overall discussion and increase the visibility (and thus chance of a response).

Just as a note - your reply comment and even this comment itself is also against guidelines due to being a comment on the comment system and off-topic for the article - but I wanted to make sure you were familiar with the system.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PFOF and excessive off-exchange trading persist because so many trading platforms rely on the revenue it generates, essentially productizing their clients. Defenders of PFOF have claimed that retail brokers who route to high-speed traders (in exchange for PFOF) provide better price execution for investors and that it’s a net positive, despite creating an inherent misalignment between these platforms and their custo…

There is nothing in that statement that actually shows negative effects of PFOF. > creating an inherent misalignment between these platforms and their customers is just speculative harm, and as to the other part about preventing risky trading - this is literally what Robinhood et al customers want! Meanwhile PFOF actually does have proven benefits in that it reduces spread for retail investors.

> Meanwhile PFOF actually does have proven benefits in that it reduces spread for retail investors.

To be fair, some of that is because its existence changes the pool of people trading on lit and thus increases spreads there. There are systemic effects that are a function of pfof that make it look better, and ofc there are a wide range of actors of varying quality...

Re: Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios

#410

Ummm, have y'all thought about spread costs? If you look at the spread of any of these ETF's mentioned (spread = ask px - bid px), you will notice that the spread is much smaller than if you were to sum up the spreads of each component stock. That's possible because of a mature ecosystem of ETF market makers and arbitrageurs (like Jane Street). If you buy all of the stocks individually, as it sounds like y'all's solu…

Also former HFT / market maker here (UBS, GETCO), and also the developer who wrote Wealthfront's direct indexing with tax loss harvesting 10 years ago. I had that same skepticism before I built it. Using a Bloomberg terminal back then, my conclusion was that the weighted spread for the S&P 500 was 3.2 bps, vs. 0.6 bps for SPY.And this was > 10 years ago, so I'd think by now it would be even tigher. The ratio may have…

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