FMETF halted after breaking yet again

FMETF [FMETF 102.00, up 4.3%; 37% avgVol] [link], the country’s only ETF (exchange-traded fund), was halted yesterday at 10:13 a.m. after someone realized that its iNAV was not updating correctly. Unlike previous outages, this one was corrected within the hour, and FMETF was back to regular trading by 10:48 a.m. The iNAV is the metric that traders use to “price” the basket of shares that each FMETF share theoretically represents; any change in the underlying price of any share in the PSEi would require the iNAV to re-calculate and update for traders to have the most up-to-date information.

MB bottom-line: The question that I get asked most often from new traders is: “How do I get started with investing?” There is no satisfying answer that I can give. The traditional answer that most in the US would give is something in the “time in the market beats timing the market” line of thinking, which would probably result in a recommendation to simply buy any of the many ETFs that track the S&P 500 and just rely on the power of rich people to influence governmental actions to protect the health of the stock market. But that approach doesn’t work so well here. Our market is a little bit unwell. The PSEi can’t be relied on to simply grow. So I’ve often been tempted--and I’ve sometimes succumbed to this temptation--to copy that American method and recommend FMETF under a similar “time in the market” theory, but it has always eaten away at my soul. Because I know that our market isn’t like their market. And I know that what I’m really saying is: “You’ll lose less buying FMETF than you will picking your own stocks.” Here’s the problem: the PSE is widely known as a stock-picking market, but stock picking is the path to ruin for new investors. So my FMETF recommendation has been a defensive one. I desperately want a better recommendation to give, and I’m working on how to do that, but for now, FMETF is unsatisfying for a host of reasons, including this weird problem that it has of going offline at random times because its operational guts are seemingly held together with toothpicks and duct tape.

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