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Should I be concerned with the low volume of trade for Franklin Templeton's international ETFs?

Personal Finance & Money Asked on February 1, 2021

They have an attractive suite of foreign ETFs, ranging from Taiwan, India to Germany: https://www.franklintempleton.com/investor/investments-and-solutions/investment-options/etfs/franklin-libertyshares/passive-etfs

Take Taiwan for instance – FLTW. The volume traded is surprisingly low: https://i.imgur.com/N3TOuLZ.jpg

ie. it seems to have done only 140,000USD worth of trade on Friday.

This compared with Blackrock’s EWT, which did 3.3M shares worth of trade = 100 times that of FLTW.

The holdings are pretty much identical, and they’re 99% correlated over the past 36 months – https://i.imgur.com/9DNcoST.png. FLTW has a better dividend rate (1.97% vs 1.69%) and a lower expense ratio (0.19% vs 0.59%) which I believe is to attract investors.

EWT began on June 20, 2000 and FLTW much more recently on Nov 02, 2017, which is probably why the latter’s volume is so much lower.

Franklin Templeton is a reputable investment firm I think, so is there a reasonable risk here of liquidity here, or any other that I might not have foreseen?

One Answer

Franklin Templeton is a very large fund manager with over 1.4 trillion USD under management. I'm not sure how large of a purchase you're looking to make, but even if there was insufficient liquidity on the secondary market to meet your needs, the APs should swoop in to purchase your shares, at a [small] discount to NAV, to exchange with Franklin.

Of course, highly unusual market conditions could always create issues. We saw some of this during Spring 2020 when NAV spreads went crazy for a bit. But that affected the big funds as well...

Answered by Matthew Vandergrift on February 1, 2021

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