Investors warned about issues with frontier-market ETFs

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) may not be the best way to access small, immature equity markets due to high tracking error and low liquidity, fund managers argued at a conference last week. “Forget frontier-market ETFs – they don’t replicate the underlying index,” says Terence Mahony, chairman of Vietnamese asset manager VinaCapital. “I think you’ll get ripped apart. You have to be very careful [about frontier markets].” Strong words perhaps, but ones echoed to some degree by othe…