By Rob Morgan I get a lot of questions from investors about exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. Many investors are curious about whether exchange-traded funds should have a place in their portfolios.
Perhaps the best place to start in this discussion is to define what an ETF is.
An ETF is a set of securities put together to track a certain index. One of the more popular ETFs, for example, was constructed to track the performance of the S&P 500. This is the SPDR S&P 500 ETFTrust (NYSE: SPY).
Prior to the creation of ETFs, it was very difficult for an individual investor to actually invest in …read more
