James Kirby

Tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Vanguard has been terribly careful about getting involved in what I would call the widening of ETFs, that for most people, they just were a mirror, a plain vanilla reproduction of a market.

So you could buy the S&P 500 or the ASX 200.

It's evolved way beyond that.

But you guys seem to be resistant maybe to some of these innovations?

Okay, but it's interesting.

You launched a technology ETF, for instance, and there isn't as such a technology index out there.

There's a NASDAQ index, but there isn't a tech index per se.

So how do you explain to people who started with you and understood that ETFs were simply...

a mirror of an existing indices that they were familiar with.

And it has evolved.

Even you guys have evolved that.

There was a time you wouldn't have done that.

So you said you would draw the line somewhere.

How do you explain to the average investor where you're going and how the industry is evolving like that?

When I say there is not an index, I mean, of course there is.

I mean, sometimes, you know what I know, that ETF providers will create an index and then launch a product to match that index virtually.

That's been going on, hasn't it?

It has evolved from the time where there was just an indices meant a market that was well established, like the S&P 500, et cetera.

But now the game has shifted, hasn't it, like that?

So more recently, there are active ETFs.