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 Patrick Bateman’s affinity for business cards. But there’s some evidence to support the idea that picking a clever ticker can be worth quite a bit of money. [click to continue…]
Following the massive injections into capital markets in recent years, inflation has become a major concern of many investors, and the quest to uncover assets that offer portfolio protection against a potential uptick in the CPI has taken on many forms. While inflation-protected bonds are the instrument of choice for some, others have turned their attention to commodities, hoping that the addition of hard assets to a portfolio will reduce overall volatility and provide a hedge against inflation. [click to continue…]
Soft commodities were active on Thursday, with sugar futures surging to their highest level in more than three weeks and coffee futures jumping on worries of supply dips in coming months. Heavy rains in Brazil, the world’s top sugar producer, disrupted output and sent mills scrambling to renegotiate contracts with trading houses after production levels [...]
The rise of the ETF industry has made commodity investing readily available to millions of investors whose options for exposure to this “fourth asset class” were previously limited. Most of the money in commodity exchange-traded products is in diversified funds offering exposure to more than a dozen natural resources through a single security (see a [...]
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday that a strong dollar is key for the U.S. economy, a goal that may please U.S. consumers but that appears increasingly out of the control of the current administration. “We bear special responsibility for trying to make sure that we are implementing policy in the U.S. that [...]
Perhaps you’ve noticed that many of the investment vehicles in the ETF industry are technically referred to as exchange-traded notes, or ETNs. While ETNs are similar to ETFs in many ways, there are also some key differences that should be considered before investing.
