By Chris Stephenson

In the Canadian House of Commons, “everybody’s trying to get on the National” according to former opposition party leader Preston Manning. Not surprisingly, this creates a temptation to stretch the truth to garner attention.

During his address to the planners at this year's Institute of Advanced Financial Planners (IAFP) Annual Symposium, Manning related how an aide, whose responsibility was to prep him for the question period, was especially talented at coming up with media friendly sound bites. The problem was most of it wasn’t true!

Asking the question "is it true?" is something presenter Scott Newman from Invesco Trimark did well in his presentation titled "ET...Fs - Call Home" to the planners gathered.

It was refreshing to hear Scott start by saying that "[ETFs] are not the panacea of solutions," especially from a representative of a firm that recently introduced an ETF product to the market.

Scott cautioned planners to beware of buying or selling at the beginning or end of the trading day, make sure to put in limit orders, check the bid/ask spread, and generally use the highly liquid ETFs where possible.

Many financial blog readers will already know to be cautious about the things Scott talked about. However, for the non-investment geeks, I think the popular media is only now writing in a more nuanced and ‘truthful’ way about ETFs.

What do you think? Are ETF manufacturers and the financial media doing a decent job of following Manning’s suggestion of asking ‘is it true’ in their communications?