Hello, sorry to post it here but don’t want to make a new thread for that.
Bought this HSBC S&P 500 UCITS ETF (HSPX) last friday but it seems stuck since then (on Degiro and here on Investing.com)
Did I just bought some crap or is there any reason behind this?
Best to all,
Markets were closed in the US on Monday (public holidays)
Ok for yesterday but they are open today…
Looks like there were no trades: HSBC S&P 500 UCITS ETF ETF Price & Performance - HSPX | SIX
Doesn’t sound like a great ETF to hold, looks like LSE is seeing a bit more volume: London Stock Exchange | London Stock Exchange but still not much…
Just as a return on experience: I’ve mailed the person of contact for the fund and he told me that if the price of the share didn’t move since friday it was because no trades were made (witch is logic and what confirmed what you were telling).
The order book was mooving so I placed a sell order at which seemed to be the market price and it sold instantly… seemed like it was the only trad since days and it made the price of the share move to my selling price… funny to make a share price move with just my trade
ETF Detail (six-group.com)
Mooving to an ETF with more volume…
It’s still weird, I thought they pay people to be market makers, but maybe they don’t bother. In any case I would be personally uneasy to trade with such a wide spread, definitely don’t do a market order.
This is normal. Someone bought at your asking price, so you (and the buyer) moved the price of this relatively seldom traded ETF after days of no trade. Sometimes such ETFs jump 5% simply because there hasn’t been a trade for weeks. If it’s more liquid, you move the price after a few minutes or seconds, but essentially the same.
Before you buy another ETF, I recommend you go to Swissquote and search for the ETF in the market u want to buy at. Click on the price graphs and 2 graphs will open, price & volume.
In the attachment you can see it for last week for HSPX.
There’s your two trades of 55 shares (right?) on 15th and 20th.
Like @nabalzbhf also already mentioned, If this is what the trading volumes look like, I avoid the ETF, or at least the ETF at this market.
Who bought your 55 shares, maybe it was the market maker, maybe not, but probably it was a bit below the market value, so a market maker algo decided it was worth it, based on the futures for today’s opening.
And it’s usually better to trade ETF’s of US shares when the US market is open, it’ll reduce the spread.
Thanks for this very detailed answer! Helps me a lot to understand what did go on. Yes the 55 shares was my trade.
Best regards
Was looking for a distributive ETF of the S&P500 with low TER (0.09 in this case) available on Degiro… As there are so many ETF available, filtered only the ETF trading on the SIX exchange.
Only investing since one year and my portfolio is far from optimal I assume, but wanted to start somewhere. Open for suggestions 
Is low volume actually a real issue when buying ETFs other than having the price evolving in big steps?
Yes: often an indicator that there’s low AUM, which makes it more likely the fund will close.
Low volume shouldn’t matter, but only if there’s a market maker. You could check that by checking the spread during the day, if there’s a tight bid/ask spread it means you’re probably going to pay the right price (otherwise someone else would take advantage of it until there’s an equilibrium).
Otherwise you might either pay a totally wrong price if you don’t pay attention, or lose a few percent on every transaction (which might not be a big deal for long term investment, but why pay 1% extra if you can avoid it…)
Is there any place where I can find bid/ask spread information for SIX and other European markets (as live as possible). As far as I can tell (please correct me if I am wrong) my broker Degiro does not provide bid/ask spread information. It only provides information on the last trades that were made. I understand that for example InteractiveBrokers provides information of the form Ask: 3.8420 x 100,000, Bid: 3.8295 x 11,819. Which shows how much stock is guaranteed to be available at what price for how many units before the price moves (important caveat the data is delayed by 15 minutes I believe). Is this kind of data available for free and for what stocks/ETFs.
I would be interested in data on for example:
Vanguard ESG Global All Cap UCITS ETF (USD) Acc (SWX | V3AA | IE00BNG8L278 | CHF ) traded in CHF on SWX . (Degiro calls the swiss stock exchange SWX even though it is now called SIX).
(For some reason Degiro has no historical information at all on this ETF, not even the last trades. I asked support about this and they blamed their third party historical data provider.)
Swissquote offers real time market data. It’s free in that there is no fixed price, but you pay an extra CHF 0.85 per transaction for it. This is how it looks like for your ETF in the app (pricing, orderbook and past trades):
Does swissquote charge just for having an account open (unused) or could I open one for free (never making transactions) so that I can get some bid/ask estimate there to use on Degiro. Also do I read it correctly as saying that I am guaranteed to be able to buy 100000 units at 4.8675 (at that moment)? And if I were to offer in between the bid and the ask nothing would be traded unless/until some other investors / market makers change their sell order?
They have zero account maintenance fee, but I assume they will close your account eventually if you not only never trade, but never even pay-in anything.
And yes, orderbook said what you think it said, but that doesn’t mean that anything is guaranteed. And for an ETF, you’ll likely get any order at market price filled by the market maker immediately. I would guess the only two retail order in that book are the ones at 4.80 and 4.75, rest looks like big block orders from said market maker to provide pricing.
What do you call “market price”? The 4.8745 listed above? Why would it not fill at the lower price of 4.8675 which was at that moment being offered according to the Bid/Ask.
I meant a limit order set between current bid/ask (as in the current market price, ignoring the last actual trade at 4.8745 as shown) would be filled almost immediately anyway, as the market marker is continuously (every few minutes, not necessarily real time) adjusting their pricing, with a high likelihood that your price would be met at some point anyway, and might also simply choose to fill your specific order (as that is his job after all). But, to be clear, technically without any change that order would not be filled as there are no at market orders open (and it would not fill at 4.8675 as your offer would be slightly below that, if I understood you correctly).
Anyway, what makes you so very concerned about bid/ask spreads? The only thing you need to make sure is that you buy during the open market (and not in pre-/after-market), and that there is in fact a market maker (to avoid at market orders getting filled way out of fair pricing). Apart from that, the exact timing and spread is pretty much irrelevant.
I agree an offer in the middle of the spread would simply not fill. But if you made any offer above or equal to 4.8675 it would have filled at that price (and not any higher one such as 4.8745 which is the price listed in bold for some reason and is I guess what you called the “market price”.). I just want to understand. Specifically I would like to see whether for these less liquid ETFs (less compared to the ones in USD and EUR) the price would shift significantly when buying a large fraction of the daily total trade volume say for example 50000 CHF worth. (What does “Volume” indicate on SwissQuote. It is very low even if it indicates just the stocks traded that day. Is it in units of thousands or millions?)
I always use limit orders so I can’t accidentally buy at a very unfair price of course but I could end up filling only a fraction of my order.
I know some people are not that concerned with one time losses below 0.1% but I am just interested and honestly putting in some time once to understand these things could end up paying off over a life time.
I assume it varies quite a bit, but in my experience you typically see pretty much a CHF/USD 100k block order from the market maker at the tightest (fair) spread, with a multiple of that at one or two wider (and not so fair) spreads.
Never seen a serious ETF at an official listing without market maker, but I would not be surprised if it exists. For shares, there certainly are some with no market maker and very limited liquidity.
It’s because it’s the last traded price, and by standard that is the one quoted (pretty sure you can change to bid or ask in the settings).
Volume is quantity, not turnover, in actual volume (no thousands/millions). So yes, your ETF has been traded today for about 1k volume or CHF 5k turnover. But still, for up to a CHF 105k order you would get a fair price (or at least the tightest spread of about 0.25%) without moving it yourself.
Hi Bojack,
I have a question on the liquidity of VWRL in CHF
Say you want to buy a boat for 200-300k one day.
How easy is it to sell that amount of shares ?
Have only 292 shares been traded today till 9:34 AM ?
I googled and I think the market opens at 6 AM
Thanks !
According to SIX, the average daily volume is around 7’000 shares. That’s some CHF 700’000 in one day. I guess you would have trouble to fill such a large order in one day. Interesting point.
The volume of VWRD on LSE is even more erratic, but in general a bit higher than on SIX.
Would anyone have a suggestion? Is there an Ireland-based (or simply, ECITS) ETF with enough volume to handle a trade of CHF 500’000 without getting heavily hit by spread?
