Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 1, University of Innsbruck, course: Risikomanagement, language: English, abstract: Nowadays exchange traded funds (ETFs) are getting more and more popular. Many investors believe that their risk-performance profile is better than ordinary index mutual funds. This seminar paper focuses on the real returns of both asset classes. It is based on a scientific paper written by Sharifzadeh et. al.(2012). The authors compared ETFs and index mutual funds which had quite the same composition. Additionally, they tested the risk-return profile of both, using the sharpe ratio. Interestingly, they found out that ETFs could not outperform index mutual funds and vice versa.