Comparison of Exchange Traded Funds. iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF and First Trust Taiwan AlphaDEX

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, University of St Andrews (School of Management), language: English, abstract: ETFs, short for Exchange Traded Funds are traded on the stock market funds. ETFs have no maturity limit and can therefore be permanently traded like shares at the current market price. When buying a fund unit, the investor becomes a shareholder of the components contained in the Funds. The index can be of a country, an industry, or even a global index. Therefore the investor participates identically in rising and falling markets according to the development of the ETF underlying index. Unlike actively managed funds Exchange Traded Funds are mainly passively managed. An underlying index should be reproduced as exactly as possible. ETFs combine the advantages of three asset classes: equities, certificates and funds. Like shares, ETFs can also be traded at the current market value at any time. This Report compares and contrasts the two Exchange traded funds iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF and First Trust Taiwan AlphaDEX. It will discuss a number of key figures and will stress the strengths and weaknesses of each fund. The following key figures for the two funds are based on self--made calculation using Excel and data form Datastream. If any figures are used, which have another source, it will be clearly cited. The time period for all key figures is two years, expect for the Pricing efficiency, which has been calculated for one year. All estimated returns are log returns due to the reason they have the property that they can be interpreted as continuously compounded returns and are addable.