JOF - Closed-End Funds Outperformed ETFs Tracking 4 Of 5 Countries
In chapter 3 of Peter Lynch's 1994 book Beating The Street, where he describes different types of funds, he writes "Many closed-end funds are more popularly known as country funds." Before many of the first single-country tracking exchange-traded funds (ETFs) launched in 1996, the easiest exchange-traded access many investors had to hard-to-access foreign markets was through closed-end funds. Closed-end funds are notorious for trading at discounts to net asset value ((NAV)), with little reason to expect discounts to tighten rather than widen other than fickle retail demand.
In this article, I run some quick