The ETF Innovation Black Hole
Dave Nadig has forgotten more about market structure than I will ever know. He co-founded Cerulli Associates in the early 1990s, went on to be Managing Director at Wells Fargo Nikko before selling the firm to Barclays to form BGI, before THAT got bought to become Blackrock/iShares as it exists today. In the early 2000s Dave joined what would become ETF.com, where he helped build their ETF Data and Analytics business which was sold to FactSet in 2017 or so. Most recently Dave was part of the team that formed and sold VettaFi to the TMX group from 2020 to 2023. Dave is currently an “independent financial futurist” and will tell you what that means as soon as he figures it out!
Dave writes an excellent substack called Echo Beach where you can read this note and many others. You can contact Dave at [email protected] and on Twitter at @DaveNadig. As with all of our guest contributors, Dave’s post may not represent the views of Epsilon Theory or Second Foundation Partners, and should not be construed as advice to purchase or sell any security.
For most of my adult life, I’ve played in the ETF sandbox because it’s been the most interesting game in town: the maximally efficient encapsulation of market capitalism. Everything interesting in investing has run through the ETF infrastructure for the past 30 years.
