Investors on Wall Street have endured another tumultuous week as domestic indexes have been flirting with historically significant resistance levels while developments in the financially fragile Euro zone appear to be progressing towards stability [see Is SPY Overbought?]. Despite the back-and-forth price action in the stock market, issuers have continued to fill the product pipeline with exciting offerings; First Trust and State Street have both filed with the SEC for several intriguing products to come.
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Equity markets have endured another wild week as investors have digested mixed news on all fronts; encouraging economic data at home continues to restore confidence in the domestic recovery, while Euro zone debt woes have cooled off considerably, although uncertainties still remain. iShares continues to ramp up activity on the product development front with several exciting proposals [...]
As indexes have been essentially transformed into investable assets in part because of surging interest in ETFs, many advisors and investors have begun to take a closer look at the details of the methodologies behind the construction and maintenance of these benchmarks. Cap weighting, where the largest weights are afforded to the largest companies, has [...]
Equity markets have gotten off to a solid start in the new year, although looming Euro zone debt woes continue to breed some degree of pessimism and one piece of bad news from overseas is very well capable of sparking a broad sell-off that spills over onto Wall Street. The tug of war between positive [...]
Several investing trends popped up in a back-and-forth 2011, as advisors sought to tweak client portfolios to take advantage of new opportunities and adapt to a macroeconomic environment that featured a number of sudden and unexpected shifts along with a significant amount of volatility. One significant trend was a rush towards dividend-paying stocks, securities that [...]
Sometimes the simplest solution is the most effective. That certainly seemed to be the case when it comes to dividend-focused exchange-traded products in 2011. As investors have sought to enhance current return profiles while scaling back the risk of equity investments, the landscape has become cluttered with ETPs targeting stocks of dividend-paying companies. Currently there [...]
For most investors, 2011 was a frustrating year; after some strong early gains seemingly pointed to a continuation of the recovery that took root in 2010, the appearance of some major obstacles sent many major indexes back towards negative territory. The impressive late December rally closed the year on a high note, but there is [...]
ETFs initially became popular with advisors and individual investors as tools for harnessing beta, allowing low cost ownership of broad equity markets through a vehicle that provided transparency, intraday liquidity, and potential tax efficiency to boot. The “first generation” of exchange-traded products were exclusively plain vanilla funds that targeted well known stock and bond benchmarks, [...]
As the calendars prepare to flip forward, it appears as if 2011 will go down as a record-breaking year for the ETF industry on the product development front. More than 300 new ETPs began trading this year, shattering the previous record set in 2010. But despite the record size of the ETF lineup, it appears [...]
For many investors, 2011 was an up-and-down year; risky assets came racing out of the gates, but a string of negative developments erased all of the early gains during a chaotic summer. Heading in to 2012, the outlook is mixed; there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future, as well as some [...]
This time last year, investors were generally thrilled with the performances of their portfolios, which had continued to bounce back nicely from the devastating recession that hit in 2008. Unfortunately, few are feeling the same sense of accomplishment as 2011 draws to a close; this year has been frustrating in that a few large, swift [...]
