The Dumbest Guy In The Room Part 3 of 3

I stopped by the FTSE booth and found one interesting item coming; the FTSE Macquarie Global Infrastructure Index which will be an ETF, possibly as soon as next quarter. I have written about and disclosed owning the Macquarie Trust (MIC) which is not an indexed product. Macquarie has a bunch of infrastructure indices including Australia, Europe and Japan. The global kind has E.ON, Suez (client holding) and ENI as its top three. The country mix is fairly diverse but the US is the largest by far at 40%. I am a big believer in this niche that Macquarie has created and while I like MIC for now, at about a 3% weight, I would swap into something from them I felt was superior.

One of the more interesting visits was with the people from MSCI/Barra. There were a lot comments left by readers for fixed income ETFs. Well, MSCI/Barra has all the indices that the entire industry will ever need (this may be hyperbole but they have a lot of them). One thing that may have come through in my post the other day about bonds is I don't feel the need to get too exotic. I would be thrilled to have access to sovereign debt from other countries. They have these indices from all the big countries along with places like Hungary South Africa. Maintaining indices of government bonds is not a huge obstacle like foreign corporates could be. I tend to think, where foreign bonds are concerned, it is more about capturing general effect than every last basis point.

My last big visit was with Rydex to whom I owe a big thanks for getting me into this shindig in the first place. The Yen ETF is in registration and will probably round out the product line. I'd like to see the Sing dollar, a currency of interest to Jim Rogers, and a way to access other crosses like eur/jpy or nzd/jpy. Rydex also has an ETF based on a credit default swap index (CDX) somewhere in the process and when I asked about a VIX ETF and confessed I was not exactly sure how it would work he laid it all out in about two seconds which makes me think, as mentioned above, some thought has been devoted to the idea. The potential applications for VIX and CDX ETFs would be very sophisticated and something I need to learn more about.

One very unique thing about my time with Rydex was the total package view they take on all their products. Every product they introduce has to be able to tie in with their use of Modern Portfolio Theory, something they call Essential Portfolio Theory. Maybe every ETF company would say the same thing when asked but the Rydex guy was not asked.

The strangest part of my experience with the conference was that there was no one manning the iShares booth the entire time. Ditto the State Street ETF booth.

One last note about the list of ETFs I took from readers is that many of them are in the works and a few of them already exist. I got a couple "hey we already have that" reactions to which I replied that if people don't know about it, it does not exist.