There are now more ETFs than stocks in the US (opens in new tab)

It's an irrelevant point because ETFs incorporate more than just US stocks. You have global stocks (tens of thousands), options (a million expirations), bonds (3 million cusips) , crypto, futures, and the list goes on. And it becomes a combinatorial exercise...

The article is pointing out the lack of publicly listed companies in the USA. But we also have private stock in ETFs now. And not to mention a handful of blockbuster IPOs on the horizon, like SPCX.

Also worth your consideration:

The Rise of ETF Slop - Ben Felix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14V7q4gHKFo

Question! Is there a counterparty risk with ETFs versus owning the equivalent fund that owns the same underlying stocks? (Assuming there is an ETF and fund that are approximately equivalent.) I trade about once a year, so there's no real benefit to me with ETFs, and I've always preferred funds.

The number of ETFs isn't as relevant as the total % of funds invested in passive funds as opposed to single stocks or active funds.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5259427

> Passive capitalization-weighted index funds now surpass active management in aggregate investor allocations. Flows into passive strategies cause unrelated stocks to move synchronously, undermining diversification and potentially increasing systemic risk. New flows into passive products mechanically overweight overvalued stocks and underweight undervalued stocks due to market-price weighting, exacerbating momentum-driven price distortions. Rebalancing at the stock level to non-price-based anchor weights may mitigate these distortions and enhance long-term returns.

This is likely why large-cap stocks have outperformed over past decade.

Fidelity offers something called Fidelity Zero funds which are pretty cool because there is 0% expense ratio. You only want to use them in a tax advantaged account in case you want to move away from Fidelity, other brokerages can't transfer them so you'd have to sell and incur capital gains, unless it's in a tax advantaged account.

FNILX(S&P500) FZIPX(US Mid and Small) FZROX(Total US) and FZILX(International)

It's the ultimate realization of the Bogleheads strategy.

Isn't that like saying there are more blog posts written than books.

Sure they are similar in that they are collections of words, but the significance of the total is not the count of how many there are, but rather their sum worth.

I'm surprised they don't dwarf them by orders of magnitude.

You can make arbitrarily random ETFs with all kinds of weird positions. Crypto, bonds, derivatives of all kinds, international stuff.

Plus you can give them funny names like $NANC.

Weren't there news last year that there were 19 thousand private equity firms too? What will things look if there are real financial headwinds? Or if something starts to properly collapse? Surely this is not fully healthy?

Well duh, there are more ways to create subsets of a set than there are elements in that set. I guess it's just noteworthy that there are enough of those subsets that are worth listing as their own ETF.

It is interesting and probably bad, however the problem is in practice exaggerated. That is because there are a long tail of ETFs with basically no AUM which get included.

Slicing at $1B AUM gets you down to about 1500 ETFs, and $10B AUM down to 350.

Avoid leveraged, inverse, active, and small ETFs as an investor and you'll be fine.

Apollo makes most of their money in private markets so they are happy to post public market FUD.

"There are more subsets of a set than elements."