Cash accounts are having a moment, thanks to the decent interest rates they now pay, at long last. But selecting one can be a daunting task given the profusion of choices —from money market accounts to money market mutual funds to a small clutch of newly hatched money market exchange-traded funds.
The term money market has become a catch-all description for a variety of interest-bearing products that follow different rules. The offerings also vary in yield, ease of accessibility and, to a small degree, levels of safety. “In some respects, money market has become more of a marketing term than a technical term,” says Ted Rossman of Bankrate, a website that evaluates bank products. “There's a lot of confusion about this.”
