Wall Street finished this rocky trading week like it started, as all of the major benchmarks finished the day well off of the session’s highs. The Dow fell by 0.8% while the S&P 500 sank by 0.7% and the Nasdaq tumbled by just 0.4% in comparison, as weakness in the GDP report combined with gloom over the debt ceiling debacle to cause many traders to flee risky assets. Meanwhile, in commodity markets, gold finished higher by nearly $11/oz. to come within a few dollars of its all-time high thanks to continued uncertainty over the American economy. Unfortunately, this trend had the opposite impact on oil as the vital commodity finished the day below the $96/bbl. level, down more than 1.5%. Softs also plunged on the day as all of the grains finished the week lower led by a nearly 2.6% loss in both corn and Chicago wheat, although industrial metals and most livestock contracts did manage to buck the trend and finish Friday in the green. [click to continue…]
One of the more popular corners of the actively-managed ETF landscape has been in the bond category where several new funds have managed to amass a great deal of assets in a short period of time. Investors have likely embraced active management in this slice of the market thanks to perception that bonds are still [...]
Inflation has been a particularly frustrating topic in recent months. Despite widespread predictions for a surge in CPI in the wake of unprecedented injections of liquidity into global financial markets, upward pressure on prices has not yet materialized–at least not in many developed markets. The prospect of what seems to be an inevitable outcome has [...]
The past few weeks have been a relatively slow stretch for the ETF industry–at least in terms of product development. Since EGShares rolled out a suite of sector-specific emerging markets ETFs on June 23, only two new products have hit the market: the S&P 500 Crude Oil Linked ETN (BARL) from Morgan Stanley and the [...]
After a sixth consecutive week of losses, investors will be looking for some indication that the steady losses have been a bit of overkill and that a bounce back is warranted in coming sessions. Equity markets have tumbled past key technical and psychological levels in recent weeks, and anxiety is once again running high both [...]
iShares, the issuer behind the $20 billion Barclays TIPS Bond Fund (TIP), has introduced two new ETFs offering exposure to inflation-protected bonds from issuers outside the U.S. The new iShares ETFs include:
Last week was relatively quiet on the domestic front, with most major indexes posting a string of relatively uneventful sessions. The real action came overseas, where investors kept a careful eye on the development in Egypt, which have cast uncertainty over much of the global economy for the last few weeks. After Mubarak stepped down [...]
U.S. equity markets have posted a strong showing final months of the year following a frustrating “range-bound” period between June and September. December has been a cheerful month overall for investors, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 both soaring to multi-month highs [consider The Problem With Dow ETFs]. Gold has not been [...]
With another round of QE underway and strong demand for raw materials from emerging markets, inflation is once again on the mind of investors. Those looking to protect their portfolios from a surge in CPI have a number of options, ranging from gold to broad-based commodity baskets to equities of commodity-intensive companies. But among the [...]
It’s baaaaaaaack. After a brief hiatus that saw investors rushing to determine the best ways to battle deflation, inflationary concerns have begun to surface again. The cause of the latest bout of inflationary anxiety is of course the QE2 program recently announced by the Federal Reserve that calls for the purchase of hundreds of billions [...]
This past week saw no shortage of events that had the financial world buzzing with activity. The Fed implemented a portion of their controversial quantitative easing plan, buying a number of U.S. Treasury securities in an effort to jump-start our struggling economy. While this policy has been met with mixed reaction at home, it has [...]
