ETF + Q&A

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Business, Investing, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this listener-driven episode, Don, Tom, and advisor Roxy Butner tackle a wide range of investing questions, starting with the explosive growth of ETFs and why many new funds—especially active, leveraged, and thematic products—may be risky for long-term investors. They discuss whether and how to exit expensive inherited mutual funds, how to use low-income years for tax planning, and why capital gains can still trigger taxes even in sabbatical years. The team reviews a complex multi-fund por...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Reality Radio for a really great future.
0:08.0	We're talking real money.
0:10.5	Hey, thanks for joining us on Talking Real Money.
0:12.5	Tom Cock here, special guest in just a moment.
0:14.7	But I want to say thank you to all of you take the time to send us questions, whether
0:19.6	those be written or verbalized.
0:23.3	We love it.
0:24.0	We love the feedback, as long as it's positive.
0:27.6	We take your feedback, and we love the question.
0:30.7	So we're glad to help anyway.
0:31.9	We absolutely can.
0:33.1	So we're going to take up a bunch of those questions with advisor Roxy Butner in just a moment.
0:37.1	But I first want to note something here that it's fascinating to me, and that is this growth of exchange traded funds, ETFs, not EFTs, which many people still say, I think because F comes right after E, but ETFs.
0:53.3	And by the way, this was a question recently on Jeopardy.
0:56.2	We mentioned this on the podcast, and all three contestants did not know what an ETF was.
1:01.0	An ETF is a basket, right?
1:03.2	It holds other securities in it, whether those be stocks or bonds, whatever it is.
1:07.1	And they've grown tremendously.
1:08.0	In fact, $1.5 trillion added to ETFs in 2025.
1:15.0	Majority those in stock funds. Big money, of course, going into gold and silver there, thematics like AI robotics, infrastructure.
1:23.0	The fastest growing exchange traded fund in 2025 VO, which is the S&P 500 index.
1:31.4	I can live with most of that.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Don McDonald, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Don McDonald and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.