Catching Up

As I mentioned over the weekend I went to the Super Bowl of Indexing in Scottsdale yesterday. It was a long day and so as I catch up here and there (I did a 6am interview today which didn't help) if you left a question yesterday I probably won't get to it on that post so you should feel free to re-post it on today's post.

I'll share a couple of observations now and go into a little more detail on the brainier stuff in this weekend's video.

As far as new products that might be coming, I did not get a great feel for the products that might be coming. I asked several people about frontier market products and without saying it exactly it seemed like there are concerns being able to trade enough shares to accommodate potential demand. There were a couple of anecdotes about how thin and small a couple of these markets are.

I spoke to the StateStreet people about more choice in foreign fixed income and I think I got a "I hear you but..." type of answer.

I asked a question in the session that included currency ETFs to Steven Sachs, actually it was more of a request for more product like maybe the Sing dollar. His answer surprised me, he said he'd like to have a product for every currency. There are quantity limitations with many currencies so a product for every currency will never happen but that he was public about wanting to see more is a change from last year and encouraging.

I had a chance to visit with Tom Lydon and Richard Kang for a while. Both of them are on their way to being masters of the universe as I strive to be master of the couch. Both of them are doing a lot of interesting things that I think we will hear more about shortly.

At lunch there were a bunch of awards given out. Paul Samuelson, the guy who wrote your econ 101 textbook, got a life time achievement award and gave a little presentation via satellite that was pretty entertaining. In case your wondering, he's 92.

Jack Bogle was there in person to get his lifetime achievement award but he only spoke for about 90 seconds.

The CBOE S&P Put Write index won the award for most innovative new index (or words to that effect) so maybe it will be coming to an ETN near us soon.

One other point to share now is that in terms of products listed elsewhere someday trading here, this came up in another session. This is important to me as there are some very interesting products on other markets. For this to happen the industry would need to figure out how to "change the wrapper." For example there is an ETF that trades in Norway that tracks the OBX. If you wanted that exposure and there was only one way to get it and that one way was something other than an ETF, would you still buy it (again assuming you want the exposure)?

One funny item. I met one very well known person (well known within the industry), I reached out my hand and said my name and that I write for TheStreet.com (the person introducing us mentioned my blog) assuming that he'd never read any of my stuff (which he hadn't) and he said "Huh, I hear from a lot of other people from there." That was it. Lol, um nice to meet you too?