The Wall Street roller coaster doesn’t seem to be running out of fuel as stocks endured yet another wild week. Investors remain very fearful of an impending “double dip”, while the deteriorating financial health of the Euro zone is putting additional downward pressure on global equity markets. Uncertainty continues to pave the way higher for gold and the precious hit new all-time highs on Friday, charging to $1,881 an ounce as equities slid lower throughout the trading session. We advised investors to be cautious of a dead cat bounce in Monday’s Insider, which turned out to be sound advice seeing as how equity indexes failed to establish support above last weeks highs, and instead fell lower in the final days of trading accompanied by high volume. Against this uncertain backdrop, nearly all of our model portfolios remain in deep-red territory, while our conservative approach has yet again saved us from loosing our sanity during another wild week on Wall Street.
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It’s been a fairly tame week on Wall Street thus far, with investors keeping quiet as no significant economic data has been released. Positive GDP data from Japan pushed markets higher at the start of the week, although equity indexes were quick to give up gains on both Tuesday and Wednesday around noon time. The [...]
Fear ran wild across every corner of the financial markets last week and nearly every asset class fell victim to brutally volatile trading. Friday was the only day during which the Dow Jones Industrial Average did not swing by more than 400 points, managing to regain some of the losses on Thursday and Friday and [...]
Charles Schwab announced the latest addition to its ETF lineup today, launching the Schwab U.S. REIT ETF (SCHH) and Schwab U.S. Mid-Cap ETF (SCHM). The real estate fund will seek to replicate the performance of the Dow Jones U.S. Select REIT Index, the same index to which the SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF (RWR) is [...]
AdvisorShares continues to expand its footprint in the active ETF arena, announcing today the launch of the Cambria Global Tactical ETF (GTAA). The new fund comes out of a partnership with Cambria Investment Management, the firm run by Mebane Faber and Eric Richardson. Faber is perhaps best known for his 2007 paper A Quantitative Approach [...]
As the fourth quarter nears, the ETF industry remains in flux. A number of newcomers are preparing to to jump into the ETF waters while others, such as Geary and Old Mutual, are pulling the plug on ETF dreams. And competition among some of the industry’s bigger players is heating up, as recent product development [...]
Historically, no portfolio was complete without a material allocation to real estate. Consistently high real returns and low correlations to stocks and bonds made it easy to overlook the out-of-whack fundamentals that ultimately led to an unprecedented collapse. But when real estate markets got a reality check in late 2008, many investors swore off the [...]
Once considered a vital “return enhancer” in almost every portfolio, real estate as an asset class has fallen out of favor with investors following its spectacular collapse during (and role in causing) the recent global economic downturn. Real estate was historically embraced because of its potential for delivering excess returns in bull property markets and [...]
It’s been an interesting week the world of ETFs: ETFs trended upwards at the beginning of the week but fell back in trading late Thursday and Friday. Here are the ETF Database staff picks of the week’s most important and interesting stories from around the Web:
Dow Jones & Co. has begun searching for potential buyers of its stock-market indexing unit, which includes the widely-reported Dow Jones Industrial Average. The unit of Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal and was purchased by News Corporation in late 2007, creates and licenses indexes for use by ETFs, mutual funds, and other [...]
With a roller coaster six months behind us that saw no shortage of interesting twists and turns and unsuspected headlines, we’ve finally reached the midway point of 2009. Ahead of us is the highly anticipated “second half of 2009,” which for months we’ve heard will hold returns to growth, a recovering economy, and enough green [...]
