Closed-end fund shares trade continually at whatever price the market will support. They also qualify for advanced types of orders such as limit orders and stop orders.
This is in contrast to open-end funds which are only available for buying and selling at the close of business each day, at the calculated NAV, and for which orders must be placed in advance, before the NAV is known, and can only be simple buy or sell orders. Some funds require that orders be placed hours or days in advance.
((above point was highlighted by Winston))
Closed-end funds trade on exchanges and in that respect they are like exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but there are important differences between these two kinds of security.
The price of a closed-end fund is completely determined by the valuation of the market, and this price often diverges substantially from the NAV of the fund assets. In contrast, the market price of an ETF trades in a very close range of its net asset value, because the structure of the ETF would allow major market participants to gain arbitrage profits if the market price of the ETF were to diverge substantially from the NAV.
The market prices of closed-end funds are often ten to twenty percent different than the NAV while the value of an ETF would only very rarely differ from the NAV by more than one-fifth of a percent.
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having discovered this difference....why would anyone be keen on CEFs, since they can potentially be priced significantly higher than the underlying NAV ?