Spoilt for choice

The introduction of exchange-traded funds that are cheap, transparent and easy to trade has heralded a recent explosion in the number of different types of strategies available to the investor.

Investing passively rather than opting for an actively managed fund has been possible for decades, ever since computers made it easy to calculate indices and generate up-to-date price movements. Along with ETFs that simply track the FTSE 100 or the S&P 500, there are those that track different regions or sectors as well as different asset classes. There are also more complex strategies that will give the reverse of the performance or double the movement of the index. UK versus US The vast majority of these strategies, however, are currently only used in the UK by the institutional m...