What is the difference between a Mutual Fund and an ETF?
An ETF is short for Exchange Traded Fund. This is a fund that can be traded intraday like any stock on the market. You can buy an ETF in the morning and sell it at lunch then buy it back again before you go home from work. This would be an incredibly bad idea, but you could do it if you wanted. A typical mutual fund however allows redemptions and deposits on a fixed basis (usually at the end of the trading day). This means when you buy a fund you get the price of the fund after the market closes. You can’t trade in and out of it multiple times a day. Some companies (like Vanguard) won’t even let you buy back into a fund you just sold until you wait 60 days. This is done to keep the market timers and performance chasers from hurting the long-term holders of the fund and keep down costs. The difference here doesn’t matter much for a buy-and-hold investment strategy like the Permanent Portfolio. The hourly or even daily fluctuations in price are irrelevant. However there is one major diff
