ETF.com: What ETF is owned by the largest number of hedge funds?
Balchunas: SPY; it's owned by 154 hedge funds. The SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) is No. 2, at 112. GLD is punching above its weight, because it's not the second-biggest in assets or volume. It speaks to the convenience factor of ETFs. You can go get physical gold, but you have to store it and insure it. It's kind of a pain. The ETF comes along, and even a hedge fund would say that it's just easier and cheaper to own GLD.
ETF.com: We talk about hedge funds as a monolith, but they each have very different investment philosophies. Some have claimed that ETFs are dangerous and they wouldn't touch them. Can you tell us about that?
Balchunas: They usually have two complaints. One is on the high-yield debt stuff. They ask, "How can something be liquid when the holdings aren't as liquid?" The other complaint is on the general rise of passive investing creating inefficiencies.
But on the flip side, as we discussed, hundreds of hedge funds use the products, including HYG. Carl Icahn, who's the king of the hedge funds, says, and I'll quote him here, "There is no liquidity"—this is about HYG—"That's what's going to blow this up."
Now, you have 50 hedge funds that hold HYG. So either they don't listen to him, or he has another motivation. Bill Ackman, another big hedge fund manager, also expressed some complaints about ETFs, but that was after a rough year for his hedge fund. You might want to factor that in.
Either way, the hedge fund relationship with ETFs is a layered one. They use them in certain cases; they complain about them in other cases. The term I use is "frenemies."
ETF.com: Do some of them feel threatened by ETFs, with all the alternative ETFs and smart-beta ETFs coming out?
Balchunas: I don't think they feel threatened. Liquid alts—which are hedge fund strategies in passive structures like ETFs—just haven't done much. There are two reasons for this.
One is that when you're doing sophisticated strategies that involve shorting―especially since shorting can be costly, and you have to time it―putting that into a rules-based index might not be the most efficient way to exercise that.
And No. 2 is, when you buy a hedge fund, you're kind of buying the brain of the manager. Where smart beta has really made a threat to active is in the factors. CalPERS is a high-profile example: They fired their hedge funds and employed a factor strategy in-house. That didn't involve ETFs, but it tells you it's possible you could swap out some hedge fund strategies and use factor ETFs in their place.
Smart beta assets are $500 billion. That's real money. So if anything was a threat to hedge funds, it would probably be in the factor area―not the liquid alts. I just don't see the merger arb ETF taking any assets from a real merger arb hedge fund.
