The next Financial Engineering Company (FEC) is expected to be a $50 billion business.
The news comes as the SEC on Tuesday unveiled its draft rule that would set up a process for investors to review and vote on proposed financial engineering products, such as ETFs and index funds.
The agency has already started public comment on the rule, which would also require investors to give the SEC at least three years’ notice before buying or selling a financial engineering product.
While the SEC may eventually approve the rule or set up more stringent rules, the rule is expected at the same time as the upcoming ETF vote in Congress.
As the SEC announced its draft rules, Fidelity Investments CEO John Hancock told investors that his company’s new product, ETFs, are a “financial engineering solution” for investors.
“We are launching ETFs today as a way for investors and others to participate in a fast-paced and safe financial engineering market,” Hancock said in a statement.
Investors have been clamoring for the SEC to make it easier for them to buy and sell financial engineering assets, such the ETFs Fidelity introduced.
Fidelity’s ETFs allow investors to trade their shares in a highly complex financial engineering system known as the Financial Engineering Market, according to Forbes.
Fidelity has partnered with financial engineering firms to create ETFs that allow investors access to the underlying market and to participate at the ETF level in the creation and management of ETFs.
In its announcement, the SEC also noted that Fidelity’s “fundamental flaw” is its inability to adequately assess risk in a portfolio.
In a report from The Wall Street Journal, James D’Antonio, an analyst with Bernstein Research, wrote that F.E.M. “could easily be one of the most valuable investment opportunities in history” and that the “Fidelity ETFs may well become the first financial engineering companies to break through to the mainstream.”
F.E., on the other hand, is an obscure and highly misunderstood investment product.
The SEC announced that FECs could be used by investors in the future to purchase and sell securities from other financial engineering businesses.
Last week, F.F.L.
E , a subsidiary of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, announced that it was adding ETFs to its portfolio.
F.L.-E, a subsidiary for the Federal Reserve System, is a publicly traded ETF and is used by banks, investment funds, hedge funds, and other financial services firms.
It has been more than a decade since F.M.-E debuted, with the company being founded by former Federal Reserve officials, according a profile in the Financial Times.
When F.C.-E launched in 2003, the company was called a “counterparty-to-party” ETF.
However, F-E, along with other financial products such as CFA, have since been criticized for their use of proprietary trading algorithms, which are not publicly available.
For more from The Hill, check out this report from Reuters:
