Airline stocks have been flying high in 2010 thanks to renewed hopes over an economic recovery, an uptick in business travel, and a stronger dollar. The Claymore/NYSE Arca Airline ETF (FAA) has shot higher on the news, gaining nearly 5% on the week and 15% so far on the year. A slight pullback in oil prices–one of the primary negative factors weighing on the airline industry–has also added momentum to FAA in recent sessions. Ongoing concerns over the financial health of Europe have boosted the greenback, which generally moves in the opposite direction of oil. [click to continue…]
Claymore, the Chicagoland issuer known for its line of themed ETFs and targeted sector funds, has launched three new ETFs based on broad market indexes maintained by Wilshire. The new funds include the Wilshire 5000 Total Market ETF (WFVK), Wilshire 45oo Completion Index ETF (WXSP), and Wilshire U.S. REIT ETF (WREI). [click to continue…]
With continued worries over budget crises in the “PIIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) and their rapidly deteriorating fiscal conditions, the future of the euro zone’s common currency has been called into question. Most of attention has focused on Greece, where double digit budget deficits threaten to grind the government to a halt and [...]
Markets trended higher in the holiday shortened week, as the S&P 500 flirted with and then crossed the 1,100 mark. The dollar strengthened throughout the week as debt clouds continue to hang over the euro zone and after the Fed raised the discount rate to 75 basis points. Below, we offer our picks for the [...]
The ETF industry has expanded rapidly in recent years, with hundreds of new product launches covering various regions, sectors, and investment strategies. The surge in ETF product offerings–there are now nearly 1,000 exchange-traded products in our ETF screener–has sparked some speculation that the industry has reached a point of saturation–or perhaps has long since blown [...]
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 [...]
Through the eyes of an investors, the consumer sector of the global economy is generally split into two segments: consumer staples and consumer discretionaries. Consumer staples stocks generally include those that manufacture and sell goods that are vital components of most household budgets, such as food and non-durable household goods. Companies producing goods that are [...]
ETFs have come along way in their relatively short existence, evolving from plain vanilla funds tracking major equity benchmarks to include more exotic products such as ETFs with triple leverage, and ETFs that employ long/short strategies, hedge fund tracking ETFs, and actively-managed funds. While some investors point to the several dozen funds that have struggled [...]
Investors returned from the Christmas holiday with a lot of international news to digest, ranging from a terrorist plot originating in Africa to unrest in Iran. But on Wall Street, all was relatively calm, with most major benchmarks little changed and little in the way of major news to give stocks direction.
The week on Wall Street ended on a positive note, as an unexpectedly large jump in retail sales give investors hope that the holiday shopping season will give the economy a shot in the arm. Elsewhere, the House approved a massive financial overhaul plan, the details of which investors are still digesting in an attempt [...]
If the recent global economic downturn has battered most industries, it knocked the airline business out cold. But now the industry is beginning to show signs of life again. “After a difficult year battling the recession, the airline industry appears to be headed toward a recovery as fuller planes, fewer discounted fares, lower fuel prices [...]
It’s been an interesting week in the world of ETFs: major indexes finished the week on a down note after trending upwards earlier in the week while gold finished around $1140/oz. Here are the ETF Database staff picks of the week’s most important and interesting stories from around the Web:
