Welcome to the fourth installment of picking up pennies. Last month, we discussed what an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) is and how its structure can help investors defer capital gains, defer taxes, and keep money invested in the market rather than giving it to Uncle Sam. This month, we’ll discuss how to save on trading costs when buying and selling ETFs.

•   Volume 1 – Keep Cash Balances Low (Better Chance for Higher Returns)
•   Volume 2 – Asset Location (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 3 – Using ETFs (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 4 – Trading ETFs in Competition (Reduces Trading Costs)
•   Volume 5 – Number of Funds and Not Auto-Reinvesting Dividends (Reduces Trading Costs)
•   Volume 6 – Tax Lots and Tax Loss Harvesting (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 7 – Summary (Total Impact)

How do ETFs Trade? 

ETFs are like stocks in that they are traded throughout the day while the market is open. To buy or sell a share of an ETF, you need to find another investor to trade with. Let’s say it is 1:00 pm, and you want to sell a share of ETF ABC. At that exact time, there may not be anyone willing to buy a share of ABC. Maybe in a few hours, or tomorrow there might be, but you want to sell the share today. This is where market makers come in who will buy your share of ABC and hold it on their books until someone else wants to buy it from them. The market maker is taking a risk by holding on to ABC. What if the price goes down between the time they buy it from you and sell it to someone else?

Because these market makers need to be compensated for the risk they are taking and the service they are providing, they are compensated via a bid-ask spread. A bid-ask spread is the difference between the highest price a buyer is willing to pay for an asset and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept. If an ETF is worth $10, these market makers might be willing to buy ABC for $9.99 and sell it for $10.01. In other words, buy it from you now for $9.99 and sell it a few hours later for $10.01. Market makers pocket the 2 cents between the two prices, i.e., they earn 2 cents on “the spread.”. The cost to you is the 1 cent/share less you received for selling the ETF for less than it was worth, but you had the benefit of selling it immediately. Importantly, this cost is not listed anywhere on your statements. It is simply built into the price you bought or sold the ETF for.

The risk to the market maker goes up the more shares you are trying to trade. Thus, market makers might be willing to buy 100 shares at $9.99, but the next 100 shares will be at $9.98, the next hundred at $9.97, etc. The trading cost to you keeps getting steeper and steeper the more shares you want to trade. These trades can get costly if you are not paying attention and are trading blindly. Is there a better way?

Putting ETFs in Competition

If HIG wanted to trade 1,000 shares of ABC and sent a typical order to sell 1,000 shares to the market, we would end up paying a steep cost. We might be able to get a few hundred shares traded at $9.99, but the next few hundred might be sold at $9.98 or less. This means it could cost our clients over $10 in hidden trade costs (at least 1 cent per share X 1,000 shares). How can an investor minimize these costs?

Investors can minimize these costs by putting their trades in competition rather than sending them blindly to the market. We don’t go to the market and just take the quotes that market makers have posted and incur these costs. Whenever we can, we put all the market makers in competition with each other and make them compete for our business on your behalf. We call up all the market makers and tell them we want to trade 1,000 shares of ABC. We don’t tell them if we are buying or selling and ask them to quote us their best price. By putting these market makers in competition, we squeeze their margins and improve the price our clients can receive on their trades.

Let’s take an example. On October 25th, we wanted to sell 14,000 shares of AVIG in a client account. At the time of the trade, the bid-ask spread was 200 shares deep at $38.67 x $38.72. That means we could have sold 200 shares for $38.67 or bought 200 shares for $38.72. Given that we wanted to sell 14,000 shares, not 200, we probably would have sold the shares for an average price much lower than $38.67. Rather than just sending the trade to the market, we put the market makers in competition and got quoted $38.69 for all 14,000 shares. That is two cents per share better than the quoted bid-ask spread! That means we saved at least $280 on this trade for this client.

Saving 1-2 cents per share you trade doesn’t sound all that meaningful. But as soon as you realize we are trading millions of shares, costs escalate quickly. We care about these costs, even if they don’t appear on a statement. Our clients only see that we sold AVIG for $38.69/share rather than $38.67/share. Clients don’t know we saved them $280 in hidden trading costs on this trade. As background, it’s estimated that less than 20% of financial advisors take the time to put their clients’ ETF trades in competition to reduce these hidden costs. In 2023, we traded ~$9 million shares of ETFs in our client accounts. Assuming we saved ~$0.02/share on average by trading via competition, that is $180,000 in savings. Now you know!

Welcome to the third installment of picking up pennies. Last month, we discussed investing fixed income in IRAs and investing equities in ROTH and taxable accounts to minimize taxes and maximize after-tax returns. However, we employ many more tax strategies to reduce the taxes our clients pay each year. This month, we will discuss how Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) further reduce our clients’ annual taxes.

•   Volume 1 – Keep Cash Balances Low (Better Chance for Higher Returns)
•   Volume 2 – Asset Location (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 3 – Using ETFs  (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 4 – Trading ETFs in Competition (Reduces Trading Costs)
•   Volume 5 – Number of Funds and Not Auto-Reinvesting Dividends (Reduces Trading Costs)
•   Volume 6 – Tax Lots and Tax Loss Harvesting (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 7 – Summary (Total Impact)

What is an ETF?

An ETF is a type of pooled investment vehicle, just like a Mutual Fund. Investors pool their money together and hire an asset manager to invest it toward a common investment goal. ETFs typically invest in publicly traded securities like stocks and bonds. ETFs and Mutual Funds are just “wrappers” for different investment strategies. What do we mean by “wrapper”? You have many choices as you wrap presents for your loved ones this holiday season. You can use wrapping paper, boxes, gift bags, etc. Although these options have different aesthetic appeals and costs, people care about what’s under the wrapping. They care about the gift. The same is true for investments. Investment strategies can be wrapped in an ETF or a mutual fund. You care about how your money is being invested under the wrapping.

Why use ETFs?

Although ETFs and Mutual Funds are very similar, there is one important difference between the two that allows ETFs to provide investors with tax advantages. No matter your investment strategy, you will eventually have to place trades. You will own stock A and want to buy stock B. What mutual fund managers do is sell stock A and then buy stock B. When they sell stock A, they may realize a capital gain. At the end of the year, all of those capital gains from their trades are passed on to the end investors in the mutual fund. Thus, every investor gets a tax bill at the end of the year.

ETFs work differently. An ETF manager can “exchange” one set of stocks for another. So rather than sell stock A and buy B, an ETF manager can go to a market participant and exchange stock A for stock B. Because no cash changes hands, no capital gains are realized. Thus, at the end of the year, no capital gains are passed on to investors. ETFs don’t eliminate the capital gains taxes; they defer them. Thus, you only pay the capital gains when you, the investor, not the manager,  sell the investment. You get to determine when you pay taxes rather than being forced to pay them year after year.

This deferral of taxes provides investors with a lot of advantages. By deferring taxes, you can continue to invest the money you would have paid in taxes and earn a return on it. In addition, if you hold the assets to death, your beneficiaries would get a step-up in cost basis, and you would never pay the taxes. Assuming no step-up, the after-tax return benefit of using ETFs rather than Mutual Funds is ~0.05% per year. Including the step-up at death, the benefit would be ~0.5% per year.

Although these tax savings can be large, trading ETFs can be trickier than trading mutual funds. Next month, we will talk about how we trade ETFs by having market makers compete for our business and lower trading costs for clients. This is yet another way to bring unique value to our clients.

This information is educational and does not intend to make an offer for the sale of any specific securities, investments, or strategies. Returns and market information quoted here was pulled from publicly-available, third-party sources believed to be accurate. Investments involve risk and, past performance is not indicative of future performance. Any actual return will be reduced by advisory fees and any other expenses incurred in the management of a client’s account. Consult with a qualified financial adviser before implementing any investment strategy.

Welcome to the second installment of picking up pennies. Last month, we discussed minimizing the cash in our client’s portfolios to maximize the return our clients get from their assets. Improving financial outcomes does not only come from maximizing investment returns, though. It also comes from minimizing taxes. This month, we will discuss asset location, what it is, how one can benefit, and how we use it.

•   Volume 1 – Keep Cash Balances Low (Better Chance for Higher Returns)
•   Volume 2 – Asset Location (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 3 – Using ETFs (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 4 – Trading ETFs in Competition (Reduces Trading Costs)
•   Volume 5 – Number of Funds and Not Auto-Reinvesting Dividends (Reduces Trading Costs)
•   Volume 6 – Tax Lots and Tax Loss Harvesting (Reduces Taxes)
•   Volume 7 – Summary (Total Impact)

What is asset location?

Asset location is investing different types of assets (stocks vs. bonds) in various types of accounts (IRAs vs Trusts) to reduce overall taxes the investor pays over time.

The typical investor has three different types of accounts that are each taxed differently: IRAs (tax-deferred), Trusts (taxable), and ROTHs (tax-exempt). Since the investment gains from stocks and bonds are taxed differently, it is important to match the assets and accounts in a tax-optimal way.

How can asset location reduce taxes?

Taxable bonds (i.e., non-municipal bonds) are very tax-inefficient assets as they produce annual taxable income taxed at ordinary income rates (higher tax rates) rather than capital gains tax rates. If you hold bonds in a taxable account, you must pay those taxes year after year. Ultimately, this will reduce the dollar amount of investible assets that investors can earn a return on. Therefore, holding bonds in an IRA and deferring those taxes is preferred.

Stocks (particularly ETFs) are tax-efficient assets because most of their growth comes in the form of capital gains (lower tax rates) that you only need to pay when you sell the investment (not every year). If you hold stocks in an IRA, those gains will be taxed at ordinary income tax rates when you take distributions rather than capital gains rates. Thus, having stocks in a taxable account and paying the lower capital gains rate is preferred. Further, because stocks also tend to grow in value faster than bonds, if you have the option of a ROTH account, you would prefer to hold stocks in a ROTH account because you don’t pay any taxes on those gains nor their distribution from the account.

Let’s look at a simple example. Imagine an investor who wants to own 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds. In addition, half of their money is in an IRA, and half is in a taxable trust. Most advisors simply invest each account in the same 50/50 allocation. It is simple and easy to manage. You can buy software that automatically checks and rebalances the portfolio to these percentages.

Unfortunately, the above is not a tax-optimal solution. If we compare a lazy, uniform 50/50 solution to an asset location-optimized portfolio over a 30-year period, we’ll see a substantial difference in outcomes.

Assumes 5% bond returns and 10% equity returns. Assumes a 25% income tax rate and a 15% capital gains tax rate.

With the same starting capital ($1M) and the same 50/50 overall allocation, an investor ends up with 6.2% more wealth over a 30-year investment period by using asset location effectively. This equates to 0.2% higher returns every year. This benefit will change for each investor based on their allocation and money in each type of account. The higher your tax rate, the more critical the optimal location becomes.

How does HIG use asset location?

We manage the allocation for all our clients at the household (highest) level rather than the account (lowest) level. By looking at the entire household, we can take advantage of asset location by putting assets like bonds and real estate in IRAs and high-growth assets like stocks in taxable and ROTH accounts. This way, we can ensure that each client has the correct allocation at the household level while being flexible at the account level to take advantage of the tax advantages of asset location.

We do this by creating a priority list for each type of account. We will put as many stocks as possible in a Roth, as much real estate and bonds as possible in the IRAs, and the overflow will be invested in the taxable accounts. Overall, investors don’t benefit from total investment returns; they care most about after-tax returns. Although care for asset location takes more time to manage, our commitment to picking up every basis point is part of a broader philosophy and commitment at Hill Investment Group. We understand that the little things, the pennies, add up to create meaningful gains for our clients. Through careful management and a relentless pursuit of opportunities, we believe these small gains will culminate in a substantial increase in overall returns. 

This information is educational and does not intend to make an offer for the sale of any specific securities, investments, or strategies. Returns and market information quoted here was pulled from publicly-available, third-party sources believed to be accurate. Investments involve risk and, past performance is not indicative of future performance. Any actual return will be reduced by advisory fees and any other expenses incurred in the management of a client’s account. Consult with a qualified financial adviser before implementing any investment strategy.