Opinion by Rich Strait Today ETFs provide the smaller retail investor an ever-growing variety of products that offers indirect access to the futures markets via these securitized instruments. Transactions are done simply through the investor’s retail securities account, bypassing the requirement of maintaining a regulated futures account with an FCM. However, this comes at a relatively high cost to the investor. Fees, tax treatment and inefficient futures hedging practices hat may cause price correlation slippage between the ETF price and that of the underlying commodity must all be considered. Despite these pricing realities, the meteoric growth of ETFs has dramatically…