by sethd on March 19, 2010
A week highlighted by the relatively uneventful Federal Reserve meeting saw equity markets head generally higher, as investors cheered the prospect of several more months of low interest rates. After months of heated debate, a vote on health care reform looms over the weekend, and health care funds above-average volumes throughout the week. Below, we offer our picks for the week’s most important and interesting ETF stories from around the Web (sign up for our free ETF newsletter to get ETF analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox): [click to continue…]
Emerging markets ETFs represent the crossroads of two of the hottest investment trends of recent years. As the U.S., Japan, and developed European economies struggled to pull out of recessions and avoid a double dip, the world’s emerging economies raced ahead, led by the BRIC bloc of nations. According to the International Monetary Fund, the economies of China and India are expected to increase by 10.0% and 7.7% in 2010, compared to 2.7% for the U.S. and 2.1% for developed economies in aggregate. [click to continue…]
Whenever a company prepares for a public offering, executives have been known to spend an inordinate amount of time choosing the combination of letters that will serve as the company’s ticker and often nickname within the investment community. To many, the fixation on selecting the perfect ticker seems like an irrational obsession on par with [...]
In its latest semi-annual review, MSCI Global Standard Indices announced that it will add 11 Brazilian companies to the MSCI Emerging Markets Index at the end of November, along with seven Chinese companies (one Chinese company will be deleted). This benchmark underlies iShares‘ MSCI Emerging Markets Index Fund (EEM), the largest emerging markets ETF with [...]
Historically, most U.S. investors steered the vast majority of their equity holdings into domestic stocks, shying away from emerging markets because of their “excessive” volatility. But over the last few years, U.S. markets have experienced unprecedented turbulence and a prolonged downturn while many emerging markets have proved to be surprisingly resilient in the face of [...]
Emerging Global Advisors on Wednesday launched the Dow Jones Emerging Markets Financials Titans Index Fund (EFN), the first exchange-traded fund to offer targeted exposure to banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions in emerging markets. EFN brings Emerging Global Advisors’ line of products to four, with the other three including:
Although the entire ETF industry has enjoyed a tremendous boom over the last year, perhaps no corner of the market has expanded as quickly as emerging markets funds. According to State Street’s industry snapshot, assets in international ETFs totaled about $28.6 billion at then end of June, representing an increase of 27.5% year to date. [...]
