As seasoned investors know, any potential investment must be evaluated not on a stand-alone basis but on its contribution to an overall portfolio. In addition to considering the risk and return profile of a particular asset, the relationship between that asset and the other holdings of the investor is of vital importance in the construction of an efficient portfolio. The addition of assets that maintain low or negative correlations with other portfolio components can add valuable diversification benefits. [click to continue…]
Commodities are the new black in the world of investing, thanks in no small part to the rise of ETFs as the tool of choice in more and more portfolios. Commodity ETFs saw cash inflows of more than $30 billion in 2009, as total assets more than doubled on the year. According to the ETF screener, there are currently 91 exchange-traded commodity products, including inverse and leveraged funds. At the end of 2009, there was $73.7 billion in these funds, but most of these assets were concentrated in a handful of tickers. GLD alone accounted for more than half of commodity assets, and the top seven commodity funds (SLV, DBC, UNG, IAU, DBA, and DJP) made up almost 85% of the total amount. [click to continue…]
Last year saw the continuation of the ETF industry’s impressive rise, with more than 100 new products hitting the market and a handful of new issuers entering into the arena. While many of the new exchange-traded products are “plain vanilla” funds that will compete directly with existing products, we also saw a number of truly [...]
It’s been an interesting week the world of ETFs: Gold finished the week around $1045/oz and President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Here are the ETF Database staff picks of the week’s most important and interesting stories from around the Web:
The majority of ETFs on the market follow the traditional ETF model – tracking an underlying equity or bond index. But as the benefits of the ETF structure become more widely accepted, inflows from increasingly sophisticated have created a demand for increasingly complex funds. Here are five of the more complex ETFs available to investors today, along [...]
