Wall Street opened in deep red territory at the opening bell Monday morning as Greek debt woes resurfaced. Broad equity indexes climbed higher towards the end of the day however, further extending their gains into Tuesday, only to fall victim to profit taking in the final hours of trading. The Fed went ahead with the twist, and their decision to sell $400 billion of short-term Treasuries for longer-term ones spooked investors big time, sparking a broad-based, heavy volume sell-off across all corners of the market. Surprisingly, gold wasn’t the best defense this time around as the precious metal fluctuated during the day and sank lower after the Fed’s announcement, settling around $1,780 for the day.
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Thanks to the poor economic situation plaguing America, a number of proposals have been released in order to try to end this malaise. Massive stimulus was thrown at the market by leaders in D.C. while the Fed sought to do its part by embarking on multiple rounds of quantitative easing. These purchases of government bonds helped to [...]
Domestic equity indexes climbed higher day after day last week, posting a very green performance as investors showed some (temporary) relief over the debt drama in Greece. In the bigger scheme of things however, there have been no real concrete measures undertaken by the ECB to fully restore confidence back in European financial markets; for [...]
Although the week got off to a pretty good start, yesterday saw markets slide once again as fears over European juggernaut Germany and their credit rating as well as the end of a short-selling ban on the continent overshadowed any residual optimism. This combined with unemployment claims that were still above 400,000 to suggest that [...]
The first half of 2011 is officially in the books, and many investors find their portfolios in approximately the same place as they were to start the year (though a furious rally in the final week of the quarter gave a nice boost at an opportune moment). Most major equity indexes are up slightly on [...]
The month of May was a generally disappointing stretch for investors, as both international and domestic equity markets struggled to overcome obstacles new and old. Commodities, which had been a nice source of absolute returns for much of the last year, fell on hard times as well; precious metals went into a brief freefall, and [...]
As the summer winds down, apparently so too does the impressive pace of expansion in the ETF space. Although August launches were a big dropoff from the previous month, the industry still saw the introduction of more than a dozen new exchange-traded products. Whereas many of the products rolled out in previous months have been [...]
iPath, one of the largest issuers of exchange traded notes (ETNs) announced today a significant expansion of its product line. The firm introduced eight new ETNs linked to indexes measuring the performance of various corners of the government bond market. The fixed income ETNs join an existing product line that includes debt instruments offering exposure [...]
