Exchange-traded products: A simple and cheap way to trade online

Exchange-traded products (ETPs) are an increasingly popular choice with traders because of the wide variety of assets and markets they offer. Marina Gerner explains what they are and how to trade them.

Exchange-traded products (ETPs) are an increasingly popular choice with traders because of the wide variety of assets and markets they offer. An ETP is a security that trades on the stock exchange whose value tracks the value of an underlying asset or index. ETPs can be traded through any stockbroker, just like a normal share, making them extremely convenient and easy to use (see below).

The simplest ETPs which are often known as exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are those that track stockmarket indices on a one-for-one basis. For example, let's assume you hold an ETP that tracks the FTSE 100. If the FTSE rises by 3%, the value of your ETP rises by 3% as well. These products are the most widely used types of ETPs and are popular with long-term investors as well as traders due to their low costs (the annual charge onsome ETPs can be less than 0.2%, compared to more than 0.75% for a typical managed fund).

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Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.