YouSaid · the spoken record

Samara Cohen

lines on the record: 61
first: 2024-04-11
most recent: 2024-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The moments that feel the worst in markets, the scariest, the most volatile are the moments where you can define the outcomes that you're delivering investors and define your career. I look across my career at these moments that I thought, oh my gosh, we never thought, you know, this sort of flash crash, this sort of dislocation, this sort of black swan event would happen. But over the course of a thirty year career which I've had, there have been many of those. And what we learn in those moments, how we stay close in those moments, manage risk for investors, and what we learn coming out of them are the biggest contributions we can make from a portfolio perspective. And I think from a market's perspective. So it would have been interesting to have been told that on my first day of work, which was about 30 years ago.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they are interested, my advice would be to go for it. I talk to a lot of college grads who are wondering, will I be good at this? Should I try it? And look, I had a theater background, and I gave it a shot. There are so many different ways to be successful in investing in markets. And I've heard people say, you know, know your strengths and lean into your strengths. Ensure that's true in the long term. But I think college and learning, and again I'm saying this as a parent of teens, it's about uncovering your passions and leaning into those. You have no idea what you're going to be good at until you try. There's so many different jobs and types of ways to get involved, whether it's at an asset manager or a trading firm or a broker dealer or a wealth manager. So get your foot in the door. Start to see if it is what you want it to be.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, now that you said the sci-fi thing, I will share my favorite book that I read in 23. I don't know if you've read this. It was called Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is a really cool book. It's, I think, six or seven different intertwined stories that range from ancient Greece to sometime in the future, but it's a story about hope and resilience and space and time and connections, and I thought it was just gorgeously written. And I read a lot of fiction, and I like things that just kind of expand how I think about it.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My earliest mentors were actually in theater. I had my first real backstage experience being a stage manager, the head of the drama department reached out to me. He wrote me a note afterwards and he let me follow him everywhere and just taught me a lot, but he wrote me a note that said, and I kept this note for years, it said, you've got what it takes, Samara. Thanks for sharing it with us. And I remember, I saved that note, and even when I was doing things that had nothing to do with theater, it gave me a lot of confidence. So I would say that was kind of my first real mentorship experience.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my husband is the curator of family shows, and right now he's going through like a zombie series phase, so I don't have a current show that I'm super not a zombie fan?”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know you always ask this, Barry. So here's the secret with me and podcasts I do listen to them. I'm not a regular on any. My trick is that if there's a topic I want to learn about or a person that I'm interested in, I search for that and just listen to recent podcasts. So I've been interested in hearing how people are covering Bitcoin ETFs. And I also actually currently am listening to a podcast with a woman named Randy Braun, who we are having speak at BlackRock. She just wrote the new playbook for women at work. And I'm excited to meet her. I'll be interviewing her. So that's how I listen to podcasts.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do it. So we were talking earlier, Barry, about flow and tell. What do you read into from flows? So the point that I'm just making here is a month in. It's a little early to extract anything about demand for Bitcoin. It's very clear what investors are saying about ETFs and their desire to manage whole portfolio risk and the convenience of the wrapper for the exposures that they want, the ETF is the first choice, and I think you're going to have to just have me back in a couple of years to see what the Bitcoin journey is.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, when I say wrapper switching, I'm talking about all different types of wrapper switching, whether it's from a trust, whether it's from a future CTF, or whether it's somebody who is holding Bitcoin who actually would prefer to hold their Bitcoin in an ETF because they're worried about losing their key or whatever it is for the reason. It seems much more secure way.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that looking at the Bitcoin ETS flows, you do have to be very sensitive to the wrapper switching dynamics and what's driving it right now.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a product that was launched in answer to investor demand. For access, so it really is a journey of education in terms of what access we're providing and for investors who want to learn more, not just about Bitcoin, but also it's an opportunity to teach investors about ETFs, to get them to participate in a markets ecosystem that allows them to get diversified exposures across lots of different types of asset classes. So for us, it's an opportunity to talk about access to markets in a broader way. And that's exciting. It's going to bring us the next hundred million of savers into equity and bond markets.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do take a more holistic approach, and I think that's what investors ask us for. We're certainly seeing this in the fixed income ETF complex, particularly in Treasury ETFs, where there's been a lot of interest and attention lately in the longer part of the curve. And what you will see is ETFs that have much more liquidity, options ecosystems will actually maintain higher price points. But from an investor's experience perspective, probably a lower total cost of ownership and they're bigger.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything else that's involved with it, it's the liquidity, it's the on exchange access, it's the diversity of the counterparty ecosystem, all of these things you can measure broadly in thinking about market quality. Is there an options ecosystem on the ATF? And importantly, the operating model matters as well. How is the custody working? Is it institutional grade custody? And if you really want to get into the details, you will start to see differences in some of the operating models as you would with commodity ETFs as well.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are absolutely holding crypto on behalf of our clients in these ETFs. I would think of it very similarly to gold where an investor who buys our gold ETF or our silver ETF, we have a custodian who is storing silver bars or gold bars in their vault physically. It's the same thing in Bitcoin. So we work with a custodian who is storing the actual Bitcoin for our investors in cold storage and on a daily basis we are sweeping actual coin into that cold storage and that custody and the fact that they are actually owning the crypto, that's an important part of the value proposition.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, and remember this dynamic that we talked about with respect to wrapper switching. So we do know that there were a lot of Bitcoin holders that were in wrappers that they felt were less convenient, less transparent, maybe didn't offer them the same sort of, you know, custody that they have. And also maybe holders who are also interested in being able to lend out ETF shares where it was harder to deploy securities lending type trading in underlying cryptos. So I think this question that we were talking about before in terms of where does the long-term demand come out, it really depends on how investors and how advisors think about this in the context of portfolio allocation.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll have to watch this space. I think there's really, with respect to what we hear from investors, there's one other coin right now and then a whole lot of coins that we'll just call them altcoins. Right. But the question as to whether investors are interested in an Ethereum ETF, yes, we're definitely hearing that they are. I think we're early days of Bitcoin ETF trading. There's a lot of policy and regulator change that will probably happen in 2024. We'll have to see what happens from here.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The convenience of ETFs is incredibly compelling for investors. They understand the ecosystem now importantly with the Bitcoin ETFs, the institutional grade custody is really important for investors as well. Now, you know, to your question about the crypto ecosystem separate from ETFs, I think there's a lot of questions there around how that evolves in terms of what we've seen so far. Is it the technology that's created it or is it really the fact that there been no guardrails around the ecosystem that is built around it? I would say the technology has a lot of promise in terms of its transparency and auditability. This is a technology that presumably could actually decrease the utility for illicit finance. However, we would really need...”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. That was initially what we thought when people approached us, like there were a lot. We got so many calls from, you know, various crypto players who wanted us to list an ETF. And the question, the first question I asked was, why do you even want this? Isn't this whole, isn't the whole point like disintermediation, DeFi? Like, I'm pretty CFI with this, you know, ETF wrapper thing going. But I guess, you know, as it turns out, it really is that desire by investors for whole portfolio risk management. So for me, I guess I think about what is the best long-term outcome for investors. And it's probably an integration of these ecosystems. as opposed to them living separately so that you can manage risk holistically but like you we need to see how it plays out”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is not just the expense ratio, but the liquidity, the spread, the access on exchange, the resilience of the operating model, so all of those things contribute to total cost of ownership, which isn't necessarily all captured by the expense ratio.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know yet, Barry. I'm definitely curious your thoughts on that as well. We know that there was demand for access. We know that there were and are a lot of holders in Bitcoin, in vehicles that investors view as less preferable to the ETFs that are now out there. So in terms of the flows that we're seeing, unclear is that net new demand, is that just wrapper switching demand? For sure. So I think this is like early stages of how this story is going to play out. I would say, by the way, though, I think we're kind of middle of the pack when we think about what investors will look for in terms of costs of an ETF. We really encourage people to look at what we call total cost of ownership.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think for all types of ET apps, as we talked about, it takes an ecosystem to make them work, given our experience as a markets risk manager in all types of markets. We engage frequently with all types of regulators who are a key part of the ecosystem on how things are working with our observations around ETFs, around markets, around trading, and around liquidity. So with respect to the SEC, our engagement was much less about the if and much more about the how. Here are the ways to provide robust and resilient access to investors in an ETF.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first I think the narrative from investors really grew over the past few years. The infrastructure in the crypto world was also evolving, but regulation and policy has been evolving as well and still has a long ways to go. So I think regulators needed to, and the SEC in particular needed to hear from investors, needed to work through the operating model. And then also remember, I mean, you and I have talked about what the past three years have looked like, this SEC has a very ambitious equity market structure agenda on their plate, and that's really been their priority. But I think ultimately investor demand and desire for access in an ETF won out.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we heard from advisers too, who were getting asked by their clients, and they wanted to provide whole portfolio solutions to their clients. So I think we really became convinced, first of all, that investors wanted access. And second, that the ETF would actually provide a better access path than was currently available out there in the market.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It in a trust structure where they didn't have a lot of liquidity and high fees if they were buying a futures based product, which really wasn't delivering Bitcoin, if they were buying actual Bitcoin, they were having to deal with a whole new set of infrastructure and pipes and custody questions that weren't transparent and hard to understand.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years ago, about Bitcoin ETFs, and remember, I am a bond market veteran. So I thought to myself, look, I will come into the office like all day long. I get excited about bringing access and transparency to markets where it didn't exist before. So the high yield market, high yield bond market, for example, that's a no-brainer to put into an ETF wrapper. But to me, it seemed like it was pretty straightforward to just buy some Bitcoin using your mobile phone. And so for us to really be convinced as to the value proposition of an ETF really took hearing from investors all types of investors over the subsequent years. And this is what we heard. Number one, we heard they wanted access to Bitcoin. Many of them, for different reasons, were interested in it as kind of an emerging asset class that they wanted some access. And they were trying to get access in a variety of ways, none of which were fully satisfying, whether they were buying.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a journey for Markets Barry. I think when I first started getting asked about Bitcoin ETFs, it was about five years ago and when I first heard about Bitcoin, it was probably about ten years ago. And for us, the question of whether we should provide access to Bitcoin in an ETF is something that came about really in the last few years. There were issues that filed for Bitcoin ETFs before we did. There were issuers that actually launched futures-based Bitcoin ETFs before we did. And I think that journey for the industry showed us a few things. First, it showed us with respect to the futures ETFs that wasn't really delivering what investors were looking for, meaning for a whole bunch of reasons, particularly position limits, the futures ETF actually underperformed spot Bitcoin, which is what investors wanted. Now, full disclosure. When I first got asked a few...”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Daily basis, or would they resist thinking that that was giving up some sort of secret sauce? And as it turns out, a lot of managers were comfortable with the transparency. There was some experimentation with non-transparent active ETFs, but as it turns out, I think those were pretty easily reverse engineered. So going through the trouble of making it non-transparent didn't help that much given how much they trade. But investors still want active strategies. The question is, is that manager delivering alpha or excess return such that the incremental fees justify it and the transparency of return that traditional ETFs give investors really holds those alpha seeking managers accountable? But when they can produce it, people will pay for it and they'll pay for it in an ETF wrapper.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, remember even within the index category, it's becoming increasingly active, so there are index strategies that take a lot of design principles around how to algorithmically provide a strategy, right? And those are like everything as we talked about, these active risk benchmarks, anything beyond market cap weighted. But also, importantly, in 2023 in the United States, 25% of new money going into ETFs was in active ETFs. So in 2019, actually the SEC passed a long awaited ETF rule that made it much easier for any type of asset manager who wanted to distribute their strategy in the ETF wrapper to do so. And there was actually a lot of questioning at the beginning, well, because ETFs are transparent, would they do that? Would they actually want to have to publish their holdings on an”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're spot on. So the number one misunderstanding is who owns them. We are a fiduciary. The investors own those stocks. And then beyond that, it's more of a regulatory and technology problem to fix. The regulations say that the asset manager votes the shares, and so what we started to do in our institutional accounts where regulation permitted it, and it was just technology and operations, was to create a program of voting choice that other asset managers actually then went and copied to say to institutions, let's separate the two. And if you want to vote your shares, go ahead and vote your shares. But it's been much harder to do that for individual investors. So being able to take a first step towards”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clients, we give them voting choice so they can tell us BlackRock we want to vote our own shares or we give them a menu of options and they direct us and so we have been until now really unable to offer that to individuals but as we get better data and information we're able to expand choices to our clients.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit harder with ETFs, but our ability to capture and analyze data just as there's much more information on everything, even if it's just looking at the nature of prints on exchange, we are able to derive much more data to make assumptions and really educated guesses about who owns the ETFs. And increasingly, we actually do have end user information. So a really important and exciting announcement we made, and we're the first to do this is to in our S&P 500 ETF for certain investors, individual investors, give them the ability to decide if they want to vote their shares. And that's been a really important dialogue in the market because as an asset manager, we don't own the shares, but for our ETFs, often the laws say we need to vote the share, but our job is to be asset managers. And so if clients want us to vote their shares for them, we can, but we prefer and with our institutions.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, TF. But let's say that there is an imbalance of demand. More people want to buy that ETF than sell that ETF, so we start to see the price of the ETF. Actually, what we traded a little bit of a premium to those underlying bonds. So then what the market maker can do is create more ETF shares to meet that demand by buying the underlying bonds, delivering it to me, I will be the portfolio manager in this case, and then we give you the ETF shares. So I don't have to put the cash to work. The market has done that for me. They've been incentivized to do that because this market maker she has captured the arbitrage spread that was available. And I didn't have to incur transaction cost drag for the shareholders in my fund. So that's one of the mechanisms that have made ETFs deliver so effectively for investors.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Who has to put cash to work? Now, one of the most exciting aspects of the ETF innovation is the fact that portfolio managers of ETFs don't have to manage the cash. They can if they want to, but they can also do what we call in-kind trades with the street or with liquidity providers. So first, if people are buying the ETF, number one difference just to take a step back is that you can go and buy the ETF on exchange through your brokerage account. You don't have to write a check and send it into a mutual fund company. You are buying the ETF on exchange. Somebody is selling it to you. And if they have the seller on the other side, then there's nothing that the portfolio manager has to do. The buyers and sellers match off on exchange. And that's important because on average, it's about six to eight times as much trading happens on exchange as in the”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the things we talked about before are the challenges of cash management in a portfolio and certainly in a bond market portfolio, that's a challenge for a manager who doesn't want to underperform the benchmark, but has to be...”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's totally true. But one of the things that gets me super excited because I am just a career markets modernizer is that there's been a virtuous cycle and effect back on the bond market because investors have really demanded and wanted to participate in fixed income ETFs, bond dealers and trading desks have had to develop algorithmic pricing capabilities so that they could make markets in those ETFs and that has had the effect of increasing electronification and transparency in the underlying bond market, which is why again there's been this introduction of ETFs as a new bond tool has actually had an important modernizing effect on that underlying market ecosystem.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saw that profoundly over the COVID volatility period where bonds, because the bond market had largely traded, still trades big parts of the bond market trade in a very bilateral voice over telephone way. And these traders were literally packing up their desks and having to go home and reconstruct their workstations.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first ETFs are literally transparent. You always can see what's in the holdings of a particular ETF. That's available on a daily basis, but even more critically, ETF's trade on exchange all day long and provide price formation in that way. So one of the things we often see, for example, in country fund ETFs, a perfect example of it is looking at ETFs with China equities underlying them over the lunar new year. They are providing price formation by trading on stock exchanges so investors can exchange risk on exchange while those underlying equity markets are actually closed. The bond market, by the way, you probably know this. I'm a bond market veteran. Like the bond market has a lot of closure days where equity markets aren't open. So bond ETFs are providing a price transparency to fixed income markets all of the time. And we really”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Markets are more transparent and resilient as a result of ETFs being in them than they have ever been in history, Barry, and I reject the notion that a transparent, resilient, and more accessible market, again, look at these forty million investors that are coming into the market and are only able to do it through diversified strategies because of ETFs and index, I reject the notion that there is anything broken about that. That is a healthy market and that is a market that is better positioned for the next decade of growth than ever before.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally fair description, but I would say it's a relatively modern one because even five years ago those managers might buy futures instead of ETFs. And what we found when we engaged with a lot of them, one of the things we did was we built technology to help asset managers evaluate the relative value between an ETF and a futures contract. It really mattered what they were earning on their cash. You had to be earning something in order to make it worth the price of the future. Otherwise, the ETF looked quite cheap and as it turned out, remember where rates were five years ago. It was much more economical for them to move into the ETF. So using the ETF for the cash equitization has become a really standard active use of an ETF strategy, but it is a more modern one.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're exactly right. And I think additionally, if we agree that as a gut check, 20% of the equity market is indexed, right? ETFs are otherwise, it's important to remember that that is often by active managers who have beta as some component of their alpha-seeking strategy. So their decision to make a beta allocation through some sort of index strategy is an active one and is part of the broader setup of their portfolio and potentially given the technology and indexing has risen alongside computing power, it actually required actually the first kind of commercial microchip came about around the same time as index investing because you needed computing power to be able to do that. And now that asset managers can make beta allocations, they can focus their attention and resources on their highest.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So it's a victory for investors, and it's a victory for those millions of people who are moving from being savers to investors, which is incredibly important in today's world as we think about retirement and people being able to retire with dignity. And then the other important part of your question, though, and I know you agree with me on this because I've heard you talk about it, is we have to look at the equity market overall. So that 50% stat, you know, is a little bit misleading with respect to the denominator. ETFs are probably about 12 or 13% of the equity market. Not 50%. And that gets back to these questions about is there a ceiling? Like there is mostly active management happening in price formation in global equity markets.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're more accessible and diversification and more sophisticated strategies, for example, like target date funds for the fifty seven million Americans that actually don't have a workplace savings account, they can now through an ETF access target date investor investing where they basically make one.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or SP 500. There are factor strategies, there are increasingly diverse range of bond market strategies across the different sub-asset classes of fixed income. So increasingly for us, we like to think of that whole new genre of index ETFs as almost active risk benchmark. Anything that's not cap weighted represents a decision by the investor to take some active risk versus the standard capweighted benchmark. So that's why I really think of index and active as a really broad continuum with index being able to take on more and more types of strategies that importantly were never accessible to individual investors before. And that's why I maintain that today's markets as a function of index and ETF technology are simply better.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, Barry, I am a huge fan of active managers and what they can achieve. My disclosure here will be that I'm married to a brilliant active manager. So I like to say that we are an alpha beta couple. But increasingly active managers have beta allocations. They always have, of course, they might use S&P futures, for example, as part of their strategies. And increasingly, really, all of the biggest active asset managers in the world use ETFs for some part of their alpha seeking strategy. So let's look at two things. Number one, the statistics that you gave, which is really about the fund market, it's important to realize that what is available through an index strategy has evolved massively over the past few years. So we're really not just talking about traditional cap-weighted strategies, which are kind of what you would get in a futures type strategy like with, you know, Russell.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do. We do track it closely, and a few people have done really interesting work, particularly NASDAQ has done some interesting work on individual stocks versus allocations to ETFs and to index. And this trend that we're talking about, the individual investor trend, is absolutely across the market. We've seen it in options as well, which is why ETFs that have some sort of embedded options outcome are also seeing a lot of interest, particularly from the self-directed investors.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's both of those things, so when people had their stimulus checks and there was commission free trading, and to your point they were home and learning about all of the things they could do with technology, maybe some people got involved more to just check out the ecosystem and what it felt like. But when you look at the data, despite all of the headline excitement that meme stock mania generated, more people were actually buying ETFs than were buying meme stocks. So I think it has been a really important moment for investors who are coming into the market and coming in maybe because they're starting with the single stock decision, but actually moving and learning about ETFs and then participating in a more diversified and long-term way.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“so that they can save for retirement or whatever financial wellness looks like to them. So that's theme number one. And the second one is the ongoing convergence between index and active.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly two years ago. But the point is, this has been a fast moving stream. A lot has been happening in the ETF space and in markets. What I would say to me has really defined the last two years since we spoke are two things, and they're both really exciting. The first is the move that we are seeing around the world with what we call self-directed investors, but more and more and more savers becoming investors. And we can measure that. Globally, there were about 40 million individual investor accounts that have been opened in the last two years. That's more than the past decade combined. Wow. 40 million individual investors coming to the market. Now, when I say, and I will say this everywhere, markets are better today. It's because to me, a healthy capital marketplace is one that has the transparency, resilience, and agility to bring more people off the sidelines.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I feel like Barry, if you have me back in two years, I'm probably going to say the last two years have been the most exciting years. We'll talk about, remember that volatility.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be from stocks to bonds, and it also can be very interestingly within the fixed income complex. And that's been important, particularly lately, given kind of all of the focus and potential surprises coming out of the Fed and direction of monetary policy. So you've seen a lot of kind of implicit curve positioning happening across the fixed income ETF complex”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Statistic is usually about 5 or 6 percent. It actually goes down during times of market stress that there's actually less market flow attributable to ETFs. So I think there's a lot of other things going on with respect to price formation. But there are really important, I think, sentiment conclusions you can draw from, you know, flow and tell type data.”
2024-04-11 · Masters in Business · Samara Cohen on Global Markets Insights With BlackRock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source