The ETF Singularity, It is Here!

You can see the smoke and steam rising above the mountains of Mordor off in the distance…

Trees are being felled, chains are rattling, orcs are, well, orc-ing away with hammer and anvil.  The factories are churning out so much product that they’ve run out of things to base it on.

And that’s when The Street gets a little too clever for its own good.

My piece at the Wall Street Journal today looks in on the tinkerers and you won’t believe what they’re up to!

Product Factories of Wall Street, let me give you a hint…when you literally run out of indexes, you can stop making Index ETFs for thirty seconds while we catch our breath.

It was one thing when they started creating ETFs for every single index in creation, fine, I use a bunch of them and choice is what separates us from Russia (where there are two TV channels, one channel that tells you what’s on the other channel).  But now we’ve reached the point where ETF product guys are paying index companies to invent new indexes just so they can ETF them.  This isn’t the tail wagging the dog, this is the tail giving birth to puppies.

Keep reading:

Let Me Give You a Hint…  (WSJ)