Matt Levine, Columnist

Indexes, Insiders and ICOs

Also proxy voting, volatility products and lost dogs.

October 17, 2017 at 1:32 PM UTC

Updated on

October 27, 2017 at 12:04 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Index funds.

It is very cheap to run an index exchange-traded fund -- you don't need research or fancy analysts; trading costs are low -- but you do need to pay for an index. If you want to run an S&P 500 ETF, for instance, you've got to pay S&P Dow Jones Indices a fee to license their index. This fee can be a bit galling. Making an index is not that expensive a proposition: If you just want a list of stocks, I will sell you one for a thousand bucks. I cannot promise that it will be a good list, but goodness is not precisely the selling point of the real indexes either.