Quote from: wasserman99 on September 15, 2014, 12:59:02 AM

Quote from: Eindbaas69 on September 13, 2014, 11:11:31 PM

I'm new and I dont know what ETF means.
Can anyone kind tell me please ?

Despite there being many responses on this forum, there has not been one that even attempted to answer this question, so I will help you out.

ETF stands for Exchange Traded Fund. They are traded on a stock exchange in a way similar to how traditional stocks are traded. They are designed to track the performance of a specific basket of assets (usually stocks, and usually some index of stocks). AFAIK the biggest ETF in terms of assets is the Spiders ETF (ticker: SPY) which attempts to track the performance of the Standard and Poors 500 index (it tries to make it so it's performance is the same as the S&P 500).

The most common context you will likely see an ETF on here is in reference to the COIN ETF that is being created that is designed to track the performance of bitcoin. As of now it has not started trading. From what the SEC filings have said, one share of COIN is to equal 1/5 of a BTC.

So does the ETF load up on BTC and then let people invest in their index fund, which is assured to be less volatile than BTC?