Only 13% of Poles invest in ETFs

According to Puls Individual Investor, a study by eToro, only 13 percent of investing Poles have ETF funds in their portfolio.

"Such funds are a good tool to cheaply create a wide and diversified investment portfolio," Paweł Majtkowski, an eToro analyst on the Polish market, said.

A survey conducted by eToro in 12 countries among 6,000 investors asked them if they had ETFs in their portfolio.

"It turned out that of all the nationalities surveyed, Poles invest in them the least frequently. Only 13.4 percent of respondents have them in their investment portfolio. For comparison, 38 percent of investors in the US and 37 percent in Germany have such funds. From CEE countries 29 percent of Czechs and 26 percent of Romanians. On average, ETFs in the world are almost twice as popular as in Poland – 24 percent of investors have them," the representative of eToro pointed out.

In his opinion, we choose less often than investors in the world funds investing in one asset class, and "multi-asset" funds are more popular here.

Globally, the ETF sector has grown by 20 percent over the past decade. Currently, there are about 8,000 ETF funds available in the world, in which $9 trillion were accumulated, while 10 years ago there were only 2,500 funds.

"That is why the low popularity of ETFs in Poland has been an astonishing phenomenon for years. Especially that Poles in many fields are considered to be consumers who attach great importance to prices, like promotions, and do not want to overpay for the purchased products and services. If you move this to the investment field, the most cost-effective product would be ETFs – a cheap, liquid, and diversified way to long-term accumulation capital," Paweł Majtkowski added.

In the UA, the average commission for managing an ETF in 2019 was 0.31 percent, while in the case of an active fund it was 0.66 percent (data from Morningstar). In Poland, investors often pay fees and commissions above 2 percent for using traditional funds.

(WBJ)