As with individual stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) offer a host of different metrics for investors to evaluate their appeal as investments. Besides portfolio and strategy, investors will also consider factors including expense ratio, assets under management (AUM), trading volume, net asset value (NAV), and dividend metrics, among others.
Occasionally overlooked in this list of factors is fund flows, the amount of money investors either put into or remove from an ETF over a specified period of time. Less a reflection of the ETF itself than of market sentiment, fund flows can nevertheless be a valuable tool to identify increasingly (or decreasingly) popular funds.
