Finance

The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. 
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

KKM Financial has converted its Essential 40 mutual fund into an ETF, joining the growing shift by asset managers to a more tax-efficient fund model.
ETFs make it easier for investors and financial advisors with taxable accounts to choose when to create capital gains or losses. This differs from mutual funds, which can sometimes hit their investors with an unwanted tax bill due to withdrawals or portfolio changes.

“When you look at the tax efficiency of an ETF compared to a mutual fund, it is much more advantageous,” said Jeff Kilburg, founder and CEO of KKM and a CNBC contributor. “A lot of the wealth advisors that I work with really have issues with the capital gain distribution typical to a mutual fund.”
Many asset managers have been converting their mutual funds to ETFs in recent years, due in part to a 2019 SEC rule change that made it easier to run active investment strategies within an ETF. The number of active equity mutual funds has fallen to its lowest level in 24 years, according to Strategas.
More broadly, many asset managers are pushing the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow ETFs to be added as a separate share class within existing mutual funds.
The newly converted KKM fund will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ESN. The goal of the Essential 40 is to allow investors to “buy what you use” in one equal-weighted fund, according to Kilburg. Its holdings include JPMorgan Chase, Amazon, Waste Management and Eli Lilly, according to FactSet.
“We believe without these companies, the U.S. economy would be hindered, or would be in trouble,” he said.

The old mutual fund version of the Essential 40 had a three-star rating from Morningstar. Its best relative performance in recent years came in 2022, when it declined less than 11% — much better than the category average of about 17%, according to Morningstar.
Equal-weighted funds can often outperform market-cap weighted indexes during downturns. They’ve also been a popular strategy this year, due in part to concerns that the market was too reliant on the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks. The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP) has brought in more than $14 billion in new investor funds this year, according to FactSet.
In 2024, the KKM fund was up about 16% year to date before its conversion, with roughly $70 million in assets, according to FactSet.
The ETF will have a net expense ratio of 0.70%, equal to that of the old mutual fund. More

Robinhood launched margin trading in the U.K. Monday, allowing users to leverage their existing asset holdings as collateral to purchase additional securities.
Margin trading where traders invest using borrowed cash to increase the size of their trades, is a risky investment strategy.
Robinhood’s U.K. boss Jordan Sinclair said the firm had to get the local regulator “comfortable” with its approach to get the green light on launching margin in the country.

Tthe Robinhood logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.
Rafael Henrique | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

LONDON — Robinhood said Monday that it’s rolling out margin investing — the ability for investors to borrow cash to augment their trades — in the U.K.
The U.S. online investment platform said that the option would allow users in the U.K. to leverage their existing asset holdings as collateral to purchase additional securities.

The launch of margin trading follows the recent approval of the product, after Robinhood held conversations with Britain’s financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Margin trading is a rarity in the U.K., where regulators see it as more controversial because of the risks involved to users. Some platforms in the country limit margin trading for only high-net-worth individuals or businesses. Other firms that offer margin investing in the U.K. include Interactive Brokers, IG and CMC Markets.
The rollout comes after Robinhood debuted a securities lending product in the U.K. in September, allowing consumers to earn passive income on stocks they own, as part of the company’s latest bid to grow its market share abroad.
The stock trading app touted “competitive” interest rates with its margin loans offering. Rates offered by the platform range from 6.25% for margin loans of up to $50,000 to 5.2% for loans of $50 million and above.

Jordan Sinclair, president of Robinhood U.K., said that many customers feel they can’t access more advanced products like margin trading in Britain, as they’re typically reserved for a select few professional traders investing with the likes of heavyweight banks JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS.

“There’s so many barriers to entry,” Sinclair told CNBC in an interview. “Ultimately, that’s what we want to break down all those stigmas and barriers to just basic investing tools.”
He added, “For the right customer this is a great way to diversify and expand their portfolio.”

A risky business

Investing on borrowed cash can be a risky trading strategy. In the case of margin trading, investors can use borrowed money to increase the size of their trades.
Say you wanted to make a $10,000 investment in Tesla. Usually, you’d have to fork out $10,000 of your own cash to buy that stock. But by using a margin account, you can “leverage” your trade. With 10x leverage, you’d only need to have $1,000 upfront to make the trade, instead of $10,000.
That can be a lucrative strategy for professional traders, who can make even larger returns than on usual trades, if the value of the purchased asset rises significantly.

It’s a riskier path for retail traders. If the value of the asset you’re buying on borrowed cash drops significantly, your losses will be dramatic, too.
Robinhood announced it was launching in the U.K last November, opening up its app to Brits in March. At the time of launch, Robinhood was unable to offer U.K. users the option of margin trading, pending discussions with the FCA.
“I think with the regulator, it was just about getting them comfortable with our approach, giving them a history of our product in the U.S., what we’ve developed, and the eligibility,” Robinhood’s Sinclair told CNBC.
Sinclair said that Robinhood implemented robust guardrails to ensure that customers don’t invest more cash than they can afford to lose when margin investing.
The platform requires users seeking to trade on margin to have a minimum of $2,000 of cash deposited in their accounts. Customers also have to opt in to use the product — they’re not just automatically enrolled for a margin account.
“There are eligibility criteria. There is a way to review appropriateness of this product for the right customer,” Sinclair added. “Fundamentally, that’s a really important part of this product. We recognize it isn’t for the novice investor that’s just getting started on our customer.”
Robinhood says that its customers’ uninvested cash is protected to the tune of $2.5 million with the U.S.’ Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which the firm says adds another layer of protection for users. More

Donating my old queen-sized mattress proved difficult. I recycled it and paid nearly $100 for the service in New York.
More than 75% of mattress materials, like wood, foam, steel and fiber, can be recycled.
The economics can be challenging for recyclers.
Some states have enacted mattress recycling laws that make it cheaper for consumers. However, state programs are funded by a fee on mattress purchases.

The author paid a company, Renewable Recycling, to pick up and recycle his queen-size mattress in New York City.
Greg Iacurci

I paid $95 to recycle a mattress.
It may sound odd, silly even, to pay so much to dispose of a run-of-the-mill household item.

But the economics of mattress recycling illustrate why it can be difficult — and costly — to be an eco-friendly consumer in the U.S.
Americans discard about 15 million to 20 million mattresses each year, according to the Mattress Recycling Council. That’s an average of about 50,000 per day.
Most end up in a landfill, experts said.
Mattresses are “one of the hardest things to recycle,” said Alicia Marseille, a sustainability and circular economy expert at Arizona State University.
“It’s a massive waste stream,” she said.

‘It’ll probably be there for hundreds of years’

Mattresses at a garbage dump.
Robert Brook | Corbis | Getty Images

My mattress — a queen-sized hand-me-down from family and probably close to two decades old — was in desperate need of replacement. The average mattress has a lifespan of about 14 years, from manufacture to consumer disposal, according to MRC.
But what to do with it?
I live in Brooklyn, where residents can dispose of a mattress for free as part of routine trash pickup.
As someone who meticulously tries to cut waste in everyday life — avoiding single-use plastics, composting food scraps — it was painful to think of mine wasting away in a landfill.

“If you put your mattress in a landfill, it’ll probably be there for hundreds of years, just sitting there,” said Meg Romero, the recycling and litter control superintendent for Charles County, Maryland.
Surely, I can find a new home for it instead, I thought.
Wrong.
After two weeks of unsuccessful dispatches to local homeless shelters, organizations like The Salvation Army and Goodwill, and community forums like Buy Nothing and The Freecycle Network, I’d exhausted my patience for a free-giveaway option.
Individuals who donate a mattress to certain groups may be able to claim a tax deduction for its fair market value on their federal tax return. Taxpayers would need to itemize their deductions to benefit.
Did I neglect to reach out to some interested parties? Probably. Might someone else have different results? Yes. But my personal cost-benefit analysis dictated that it was time to ditch donations.
I researched some recycling options, and selected Renewable Recycling Inc., based in East Rockaway, New York. There are few other U.S. companies that do such work, experts said. A directory compiled by MRC lists just 55.

How a mattress is recycled

Mattresses are picked up and placed into a truck to be hauled to a recycling facility at the Prima Deshecha landfill in San Juan Capistrano, California, on March 10, 2022.
Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

More than 75% of a mattress is recyclable, according to MRC. Some companies put it at closer to 90%.
Recyclers strip them of materials like wood, steel, and various foams and fibers, and sell them into secondary markets.
The materials are then re-purposed: Shredded foam and fibers as carpet padding, animal beds or insulation; wood as mulch and fuel; and springs as scrap steel, for example.
“If you can recycle, it will give those materials another life to be used as something else,” said Romero of Charles County, which launched a mattress recycling program for residents on Aug. 1.
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That re-use has other environmental benefits. For example, there’s a reduced need to extract or source new materials for manufacturing, which cuts greenhouse gas emissions and water and energy use, experts said.
Unusually, the Charles County service is largely free for residents. They can bring two items a day — like a mattress and box spring — to the Charles County Landfill for recycling for no charge. Additional items cost $10 per piece.
Residents recycled more than 900 mattresses in September, over double officials’ estimates, Romero said. The county contracts with a Baltimore-based company, Deco Solutions, to manage the process.

Charles County’s motivations weren’t purely environmental, though.
Mattresses are bulky, taking up precious real estate in the county landfill, Romero said.
“A landfill is a limited, finite space,” said Peter Conway, the president of Spring Back Colorado, a recycler based in Commerce City. “They want to put things that break down, things that are easily compactible.”
“Mattresses are kind of the antithesis of that,” Conway said. He expects to divert 8 million pounds of waste from Colorado landfills this year.

Why mattress recycling can be expensive

Shredded old mattress materials.
Guillaume Souvant | Afp | Getty Images

The $95 fee I ultimately paid to Renewable Recycling is “pretty standard” among mattress recyclers, Conway said.
The expense covered mattress pickup from my Brooklyn apartment and transport to the company’s warehouse in Oceanside, New York. (I could have saved $55 by dropping off the mattress myself, but I don’t own a car.)
Spring Back Colorado also charges $40 for each mattress and box spring that a consumer drops off. An additional fee of $60 or more applies, depending on the travel distance, if a consumer asks for home pickup.
Mattresses are harder to recycle than other items like plastic bottles, aluminum cans and cardboard, said Romero, of Charles County.

“They’re all made completely differently,” Romero said. “There’s no uniform construction, and there are several different types of materials used to make one mattress.”
The process is more time- and labor-intensive, she said. Often, workers must break them down by hand.
For example, cotton remnants must be picked off steel mattress springs before it can be shredded or baled for sale to scrap markets, according to the Mattress Recycling Council. Staples also need to be removed from wood frames before going to market, it said. Each coil in a “pocket coil mattress” is individually wrapped in fabric and must be separated, Romero said.

‘Razor-thin margins’

Additionally, mattress materials yield only “modest revenues” when sold, Reid Lifset, a research scholar and resident fellow in industrial ecology at Yale School of the Environment, wrote in an e-mail.
Those revenues often depend on fluctuating commodity prices.
“We don’t set the price for a ton of foam or steel,” Conway said. “One day we might get 18 cents a pound and the next week only get 10 cents.”

If you put your mattress in a landfill, it’ll probably be there for hundreds of years, just sitting there.

Meg Romero
recycling and litter control superintendent for Charles County, Maryland

There must also be a market demand for those commodities — and sometimes those markets aren’t nearby, adding to shipping costs.
For example, Spring Back Colorado used to send all its foam and ticking to a recycling center in California, Conway said. It cost the company about $2,000 to ship each truck load.
About a year ago, that California partner stopped accepting shipments: Demand had dried up for material, Conway said. He called companies as far afield as Mexico, Canada, India and Egypt to find alternative placement, but ultimately found a new partner in Texas, he said.
“It’s pretty razor-thin margins we operate on,” Conway said.
Spring Back Colorado earns additional revenue from mattress pickups and drop-offs, and from partnerships with businesses and municipalities, he said.
“Someone has to pay,” said Marseille, of Arizona State University. “It usually falls to consumers.”

Consumer fees subsidize recycling efforts

Kosamtu | E+ | Getty Images

Some states and municipalities are making it more cost-effective for consumers to recycle their mattresses.
For example, Charles County, Maryland, funds its fledgling mattress program largely with taxpayer money. About $150 of residents’ taxes are allocated to the county’s Environmental Resources division each year, for services like curbside recycling, disposal of yard waste, oil and anti freeze — and now mattress recycling, Romero said.
Three states — California, Connecticut and Rhode Island — have enacted mattress recycling laws since 2013. A similar program in Oregon is launching Jan. 1, 2025.
The laws require the mattress industry to develop and administer state programs to collect and recycle discarded mattresses for free.
The initiative is funded by consumers, though.

Someone has to pay. It usually falls to consumers.

Alicia Marseille
sustainability and circular economy expert at Arizona State University

Individuals and institutions (like hotels and dormitories) in such states pay a fee each time they buy a mattress: $10.50 in California, $11.75 in Connecticut, $20.50 in Rhode Island and $22.50 in Oregon, said Amanda Wall, a spokesperson for the Mattress Recycling Council. MRC is a nonprofit created by the International Sleep Products Association, a mattress industry trade group, to build and run these state programs.
Retailers forward those fees to MRC, which funds the consumer recycling efforts. Ultimately, the fees subsidize free mattress drop-off and recycling at any MRC-funded collection site in participating states, Wall said. (Recyclers can still charge a fee for mattress pickup, she said.)
The mattress industry has pushed for similar legislation in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia this year, and plans to keep working with these state legislatures in 2025, Wall said.

The laws are an example of “extended producer responsibility” policies states have adopted more broadly, forcing companies to bear some end-of-life responsibility for their products, said Marseille.
Some question whether consumers shoulder too much of the burden right now.
“Companies aren’t making, for the most part, more easy-to-recycle products,” Conway said. “It’s on the consumer to figure out how to responsibly get rid of their items in a conscious way.”
He thinks it needs to be easier and more affordable for consumers to recycle to promote that behavior.
“At the end of the day, if you have two options, and one is throw it in a hole in the ground, and the other is recycle it, 95% of the people will go with that cheaper option,” Conway added. More

Central bankers have avoided celebrations and declarations of victory. They know full well that consumers and firms, stung by the highest inflation since the 1970s, would not appreciate them. In private, though, many are elated. The sharpest rise in borrowing costs in decades, dubbed “the great tightening” by the IMF, appears to have worked better than anyone expected. Global inflation has retreated to more comfortable levels. Better still, this has been achieved without a sharp rise in joblessness or a recession. More

Central bankers have avoided celebrations and declarations of victory. They know full well that consumers and firms, stung by the highest inflation since the 1970s, would not appreciate them. In private, though, many are elated. The sharpest rise in borrowing costs in decades, dubbed “the great tightening” by the IMF, appears to have worked better than anyone expected. Global inflation has retreated to more comfortable levels. Better still, this has been achieved without a sharp rise in joblessness or a recession. More

Stock picking may be the key to getting exposure to small caps.
Rob Harvey, who’s behind the Dimensional U.S. Small Cap ETF, uses an actively managed approach to buying the group. He’s trying to avoid small caps that are underperforming and dragging down the index.

“There’s no reason to hold companies that really are scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of profitability,” the firm’s co-head of product specialists told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “You remove those from your small cap universe, [and] you can do a lot for boosting returns.”
The Russell 2000, which tracks small caps, is up more than 12% so far this year. Meanwhile, the broader S&P 500 is up about 23% in the same time frame.
As of Thursday, the fund’s top holdings were Sprouts Farmers Market, Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabrinet, according to the Dimensional Fund Advisors website. However, its top holding is cash and cash equivalents, which accounts for 1.13% of the fund.
Ben Slavin, who’s global head of ETFs for BNY Mellon notes investors are looking for more actively managed products to screen out small cap laggards.
“Investor sentiment has shifted towards small caps, and you see that in the numbers, in terms of where investors are putting their dollars, from a flow standpoint,” said Slavin. “These types of strategies are benefitting.”
As of Friday’s close, the Dimensional U.S. Small Cap ETF is underperforming the Russell 2000 by more than one percent this year.

Disclaimer More

Earlier this year, cybersecurity firm Wiz rejected a $23-billion acquisition bid from Google.
Roy Reznik, Wiz’s co-founder and vice president of research and development, said the company has received some “very flattering” offers from investors.
“We’ve already broken a few records as a private company, and we believe we can also break a few more records as an independent public company as well,” Reznik said.
Wiz is hoping to achieve $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2025 — a key condition the company wants to meet before going public.

LONDON — Cybersecurity firm Wiz is seeking to hit $1 billion of annual recurring revenues next year, the company’s billionaire co-founder Roy Reznik told CNBC, adding that the firm will go public “when the stars align.”
Wiz makes software that connects to cloud storage providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure and scans for everything it stores in the cloud, helping organizations identify and remove risks in their cloud environments. It was founded by four Israeli friends while they served in 8200, the intelligence unit of Israel’s army, and most of Wiz’s engineering personnel are still based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Earlier this year, the company rejected a $23-billion acquisition bid from Google, which would have marked the tech giant’s largest-ever takeover. At the time, Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said the startup was “flattered” by the offer, but would remain an independent company and aim to list instead.
Speaking with CNBC at Wiz’s new office space in London, Reznik said that the company has received offers from “many people that want to get their hands on Wiz stock” — but that, while “very flattering,” the firm still thinks it can do it alone by going public.
“We’ve already broken a few records as a private company, and we believe we can also break a few more records as an independent public company as well,” Reznik said.
Four-year-old Wiz has raised $1.9 billion in venture capital to date, including $1 billion secured this year in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital at a valuation of $12 billion.

In 2022, Wiz said it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up from just $1 million in 18 months. At the time, the startup said it was “the fastest software company to achieve this feat.”

Reznik, who is the vice president of research and development at Wiz, said the firm now hopes to double from the $500 million of ARR it achieved this year and hit $1 billion in ARR in 2025, which CEO Rappaport cited as a key condition before the company goes public.

UK expansion

Wiz has been expanding its presence internationally, with a particular focus on Europe, from where it sources 35% of its revenues. Last month, the firm opened its first European office in London.

“I think the talent here is amazing, and the ecosystem is amazing,” Reznik told CNBC. “We have always been very much involved in Europe — and specifically the U.K. — and I feel like it’s a natural evolvement of Wiz to double down even more here in London and the U.K.”
The U.K. represents a major growth opportunity when it comes to cybersecurity, Reznik said, adding that recent events like the cyberattack on National Health Service hospitals and an incident affecting Transport for London have “roof topped” the level of interest in the kinds of products Wiz offers.
“The cloud market is going to reach $1 trillion over the next next few years,” Reznik, who moved from Israel to the U.K. just three months ago, told CNBC. “This year is going to be around $700 million, while security is just 4% out of that, I would say. So that makes it a $30 billion market, which is huge.”
Speaking about the U.K. market, Reznik said: “We see a lot of interest here. Many of the largest banks and retailers, are Wiz customers. But we’re also seeing a huge potential for growth.”
Wiz’s customers include online retailer ASOS and digital bank Revolut as customers in the U.K. More

ETF Strategist

Exchange-traded funds have become popular with investors, but haven’t gained much ground in workplace retirement plans.
Some of the key benefits of ETFs are irrelevant in a 401(k) context, experts said.
There are also some structural roadblocks, such as technology infrastructure and third-party fees, they said.

Momo Productions | Digitalvision | Getty Images

While many investors have flocked to exchange-traded funds, they haven’t gained much ground with 401(k) plan participants.
Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, debuted in the early 1990s and have since captured about $10 trillion.

Mutual funds hold about $20 trillion, but ETFs have chipped away at their dominance: ETFs hold a 32% market share versus mutual fund assets, up from 14% a decade ago, according to Morningstar Direct data.
“ETFs are becoming the novel structure to be used in wealth-management-type accounts,” said David Blanchett, head of retirement research at PGIM, Prudential’s investment management arm.
However, that same zeal hasn’t been true for investors in workplace retirement plans, a huge pot of largely untapped potential for the ETF industry.

At the end of 2023, 401(k) plans held $7.4 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute, or ICI, and had more than 70 million participants. Other 401(k)-type plans, such as those for workers in universities and local government, held an additional $3 trillion, ICI data shows.
But hardly any of those assets are in ETFs, experts said.

“There’s a lot of money [in workplace plans], and there’s going to be more,” said Philip Chao, a certified financial planner who consults with companies about their retirement plans.
“It’s the final frontier [for ETFs], in the sense of trying to capture the next big pool of money,” said Chao, the founder of Experiential Wealth, based in Cabin John, Maryland.
More from ETF Strategist:Warren Buffett’s S&P 500 bet paid offHow a tax increase may affect your brokerage accountWhat to do with RMDs when you don’t need the money
About 65% of 401(k) assets were invested in mutual funds at the end of 2023, according to ICI data. The group doesn’t report a corresponding statistic for ETFs.
A separate report from the Plan Sponsor Council of America, a trade group representing employers, suggests ETFs hold just a tiny fraction of the remaining share of 401(k) assets.
The PSCA report examines the relative popularity of investment structures, such as mutual funds and ETFs, across about 20 types of investment classes, from stock funds to bond and real estate funds, in 2022. The report found that 401(k) plans used ETFs most readily for sector and commodity funds — but even then, they did so just 3% of the time.

Key benefits are ‘irrelevant’

Mutual funds, collective investment trust funds and separately managed accounts held the lion’s share of the 401(k) assets across all investment categories, PSCA data shows.
Such investment vehicles perform the same basic function: They’re legal structures that pool investor money together.
However, there are some differences.
For example, ETFs have certain perks for investors relative to mutual funds, such as tax benefits and the ability to do intraday trading, experts said.
However, those benefits are “irrelevant” in 401(k) plans, Blanchett said.
The tax code already gives 401(k) accounts a preferential tax treatment, making an ETF advantage relative to capital gains tax a moot point, he said.
Blanchett said 401(k) plans are also long-term accounts in which frequent trading is generally not encouraged. Just 11% of 401(k) investors made a trade or exchange in their account in 2023, according to Vanguard data.

Additionally, in workplace retirement plans, there’s a decision-making layer between funds and investors: the employer.
Company officials choose what investment funds to offer their 401(k) participants — meaning investors who want ETFs may not have them available.
There may also be technological roadblocks to change, experts said.
The traditional infrastructure that underpins workplace retirement plans wasn’t designed to handle intraday trading, meaning it wasn’t built for ETFs, Mariah Marquardt, capital markets strategy and operations manager at Betterment for Work, wrote in a 2023 analysis. Orders by investors for mutual funds are only priced once a day, when the market closes.
There are also entrenched payment and distribution arrangements in mutual funds that ETFs can’t accommodate, experts said.
Mutual funds have many different share classes. Depending on the class, the total mutual fund fee an investor pays may include charges for many different players in the 401(k) ecosystem: the investment manager, plan administrator, financial advisor and other third parties, for example.
That net mutual fund fee gets divvied up and distributed to those various parties, but investors largely don’t see those line items on their account statements, Chao said.
Conversely, ETFs have just one share class. They don’t have the ability the bundle together those distribution fees, meaning investors’ expenses appear as multiple line items, Chao said.
“A lot of people like to have just one item,” Chao said. “You feel like you’re not paying any more fees.”
“It’s almost like ignorance is bliss,” he said. More