Authorised participant
A professional participant entitled to exchange a basket of assets for fund units and back. He does not serve private investors, yet the price in the order book depends on him.
How to read the number
How many such participants there are matters more than who they are: while there are several, competition between them closes the gap between exchange and calculated price.
When the metric lies
He is under no obligation to hold the price — he has an economic interest, and it vanishes when trading in the underlying assets stops. A fund's resilience in stress is decided by this rather than by the size of its assets.
Also known as: authorized participant