Most investors looking to generate alpha and accumulate wealth over the long term spend the bulk of their time determining which asset classes should be included in their portfolio, either as long-term building blocks or shorter-term tactical allocations. But sometimes the most effective means of generating excess returns is not identifying and overweighting the top performers, but identifying and avoiding the laggards. Those with the good fortune to move out of financial stocks in 2008 or 2011, for example, have likely achieved better returns than many of their peers. The most important parts of your portfolio, in many cases, are the asset classes that are excluded entirely [see Five ETFs For Doomsday Capitalism]. [click to continue…]
iShares continued its torrid pace of product development with yet another first-to-market ETF, rolling out a fund targeting small cap Asian stocks excluding Japan. The new iShares MSCI All Country Asia ex Japan Small Cap Index Fund (AXJS) is the first to specifically target small cap stocks in that geographic segment, though a handful of [...]
The PowerShares FTSE RAFI U.S. 1000 Portfolio (PRF) recently passed its five year milestone, a period during which the fundamentally-weighted product outperformed many more popular market-cap weighted ETFs. PRF debuted in December 2005, and for the five year period ended December 31, 2010 it achieved a cumulative total return of 23.1% (based on NAV). That [...]
South Korea is home to one of the world’s most unique and promising economies, thriving off of its status as a tech leader as well as proximity and strong relationships with many of Asia’s rapidly-expanding emerging markets. But constantly looming over South Korea is the unstable relationship with its neighbor to the north, one of [...]
In recent years, investors have begun moving away from traditional active management in favor of more cost-efficient indexing strategies. The result has been a tremendous surge in the popularity of ETFs and a serious threat to actively-managed mutual funds that have dominated the investment industry for decades. As market indexes have transitioned from performance benchmarks [...]
