J’ai trouvé cet article très intéressant dans le Wall Street Journal, écrit par Jason Zweig.
Il parle des fonds ETF appelés « buffer », ou « defined-protection », ou « definedoutcome », « target-outcome » or « structured-protection ETF ». Je ne sais pas comment on appelle cela en français, en gros les gains sont capés en échange de perte limitée (voire nulle).
L’article est très nuancé et explique que ces fonds ne sont pas pour tout le monde.
Il donne l’exemple du fonds First Trust’s FT Vest U.S. Equity Max Buffer ETF, lancé en Juillet, qui est protégé à 100% du risque de perte, et limite les gains à 8,45% sur le S&P 500. Si le S&P gagne 3% sur 1 an, on reçoit 3%, si le S&P gagne 10% sur 1 an, on touche 8,45%, et si le S&P perd sur 1 an, on ne perd rien.
Ca me semble trop beau pour être vrai. Connaissez-vous de tels fonds accessibles en France, avec 100% de protection du capital ?
Peut-être après les baisses de taux annoncées, il n’y a plus aucun fonds qui protège le capital ?
Voici l’article en question:
Is This ‘Buffer’ ETF Your Knight in Shining Armor?
The Wall Street Journal5 Oct 2024JASON ZWEIGImagine you could earn much of the gains on stocks but none of their losses.
Mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that use options contracts to insure against losses while capturing some gains are booming. In 2018, there were 13 of these funds managing a total of $3.8 billion, according to Morningstar; at the end of last month, 342 held a combined $108.3 billion.
Such funds have many names: buffer, defined-protection, definedoutcome, target-outcome or structured-protection ETFs, among others.
I like to call them armored funds. Like medieval knights, these ETFs wear shining armor that can protect against the slings and arrows of outrageous market fortune—like the 18.1% loss on stocks in 2022.
But armor is also a clunky hindrance: To buy that buffer, or protection against loss, you relinquish your right to participate fully in the potential gains. Your returns are capped at a predetermined level.
So you shouldn’t buy these funds if you aren’t comfortable with that trade-off.
Overall, there’s a lot to like.
With annual expenses typically under 1% and no commissions, armored ETFs are much cheaper than fixed annuities or the complex debt instruments called structured notes that Wall Street has peddled relentlessly. They’re less risky than stocks alone, have no risk of default and are tax efficient.
Maybe you’re making a down payment on a house in a year or two and want to shield your savings against loss while retaining the chance of at least some growth. Or maybe you’re in or near retirement and seek to immunize some of your money against a market decline you won’t have time to recover from.
Then these funds could be right for you—so long as you recognize their limitations.
If the Federal Reserve’s halfpoint interest-rate cut last month is the beginning of a steady decline, some of these ETFs could become less attractive.
On funds that offer 100% downside protection, if interest rates continue to fall, your upside potential is likely to shrink, says Bruce Bond, founder of Innovator ETFs, which pioneered buffer ETFs in 2018 and manages $18.5 billion in armored funds.
Here’s why. The lower interest rates go, the less of its capital a new ETF can sink into options, making it harder to offer generous gains.
Typically, these funds lock in returns over a one-year period. The fund takes most of your money and puts it in stocks, often through options on an index or an ETF. It then separately buys a put option and sells a call option, buffering the fund against loss and capping its gains at a certain level. At the end of each 12 months, the fund resets its terms, and investors can choose to keep their money and any gains in for another year.
First Trust’s FT Vest U.S. Equity Max Buffer ETF – July, launched July 24, offers 100% downside protection with an 8.45% upside cap. Its investors are shielded from any S&P 500 loss (before expenses) if they hold until July 2025.
What about the upside? If stocks return 15%, you only get 8.45%, the capped level. If they earn, say, 3%, that’s all you get. (Then you have to subtract the fund’s 0.85% in expenses.)
A new ETF offered by First Trust on Sept. 20—two days after the Fed’s rate cut—already looks drastically different from the July fund. It offers a smaller 7% upside cap and buffers losses only up to 50%, again before expenses.
Between October 2007 and March 2009, the S&P 500 lost 56.8%. If that happened again, this fund would protect you against the first 50 percentage points of loss, leaving you with about a 7.7% loss after expenses.
When the buffer is less than 100%, says Matt Kaufman, head of ETFs at Calamos Investments, an armored fund will be “a lot more volatile in down markets, which I think a lot of people may not be looking for in these types of products.”
Financial advisers love to pitch these funds as a “bond substitute,” without mentioning that armored ETFs usually track the stock market so closely they don’t offer the usual diversification benefits of bonds.
“We do not believe that it’s an appropriate substitute for fixed income, because it doesn’t provide the ballast of bonds,” says Rachel Aguirre, head of U.S. iShares product at BlackRock. She suggests thinking of armored funds as an alternative to cash.
And so they are—if you buy on day one and hold to the end of their term.
“There’s no free lunch with these funds,” says Innovator’s Bond. “The key peculiarity is that the outcome you get depends on the price you buy at.” If you invest after day one or sell before the annual reset date, you might incur an interim loss or earn up to the cap in a shorter period.
Think back to 2020’s Covid crash. As the S&P 500 fell 30.8% between Feb. 24 and March 23 that year, FT Vest U.S. Equity Buffer ETF – February dropped 22.8%, says Ryan Issakainen, a strategist at First Trust. If you took your money out then, you’d have taken a deep loss.
The other big caveat: If you cap your returns at, say, 7%, you need to accept the opportunity cost you’re incurring.
Over all 12-month periods since 1970, the U.S. stock market has gone up 80% of the time, with an average return of 12.3%. It’s risen at least 10% in well over half of all 12-month spans and 20% or more nearly one-third of the time.
Because you forgo your ability to earn the stock market’s full return over time, “we don’t think these ETFs are applicable for most investors, especially those with longer investment horizons,” says Lan Anh Tran, an analyst at Morningstar.
Like all forms of insurance, armored funds come with a cost. Before you strap them on, make sure you can bear the burden.