After months of steady appreciation, gold has been on a bit of a wild ride over the last week or so. The precious metal has climbed to new heights repeatedly in 2011, thriving off of rising anxiety surrounding global equity markets, flights to safety after unprecedented downgrades, and even some weakness in the U.S. dollar. But last week gold encountered a rather rough patch that lent some credence to the notion that prices have inflated to bubble levels over the last few months. Investors fled gold ETFs in droves, taking profits generated during the run-up and jumping back into risky assets that have been battered by the wave of general risk aversion. [click to continue…]
Innovation has been on display in the ETF industry in recent years, as various issuers have been active on the product development front in their efforts to bring new and exciting products to market. One area that has seen tremendous growth is the leveraged ETF space; investors have embraced the exchange-traded structure as an efficient [...]
Precious metals have been on a tear for much of the last year, no doubt delivering huge profits to some of the hedge fund managers who began stocking up on bullion in early 2010. Physically-backed gold and silver ETFs took in close to $10 billion in inflows last year, as investors embraced the exchange-traded structure [...]
With the end of 2010 rapidly approaching, much of the uncertainty that investors had expected to lift this year remains firmly in place. Equity markets have staged an impressive rally in recent months, but significant hurdles remain in the form of persistently-high unemployment, regulatory uncertainty, and fiscal instability throughout much of the developed world [see [...]
Despite global turmoil and continued concern over budget deficits in countries around the world, equity markets soared in July posting double digit gains on the back of solid earnings and easing fears over the situation in Europe. With equity markets jumping again to start August, gold has experienced a bit of a sell of as [...]
Gold is often referred to as a “safe haven” investment, reflecting its tendency to rise in times of economic uncertainty. While there is no shortage of “gold bugs” that buy and hold the metal for extended periods of time, there are countless investors who trade gold quite actively. Just as signs of weakness in the [...]
The Gold Rush of 2009 likely hasn’t come as a complete surprise to too many investors. After all, gold has been proven time and time again to be a “safe haven” investment that rises during uncertain economic times (such as the last two years), and questions about the dollar’s future as the world’s reserve currency [...]
