Bullish momentum propelled stocks higher last week, although the French credit downgrade drama on Friday was enough to rekindle Euro zone woes and spark a broad-based sell-off before the weekend. Standard & Poor’s credit downgrade of France and Austria sparked volatile trading to start the week across European and Asian markets; investors on Wall Street will have to wait until tomorrow to readjust their portfolios as U.S. equity and bond markets are closed today in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The housing sector has been rather difficult to predict in the past few years. Once the U.S. housing bubble burst and the Great Recession began, investors pulled out of a number of domestic equities fearing that the crisis would last for quite some time. Unfortunately, those investors were correct, as housing in the U.S. is [...]
For investors looking to generate current returns from the equity portion of their portfolio, there is no shortage of exchange-traded products offering attractive dividend yields in the current environment. From ETFs linked to dividend-weighted indexes to those that focus on companies with stellar distribution histories to simply sector-specific funds in high yield corners of the [...]
Vanguard continued its blitz of new ETF products this week, rolling out an international counterpart to its ultra-popular real estate ETF (VNQ). The Vanguard Global ex-U.S. Real Estate Index Fund began trading on Monday; the new fund is available in four different share classes, including ETF shares (VNQI). The fund will seek to replicate the [...]
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 one of the primary causes of the recent financial crisis and economic downturn, real estate has been hit hard since 2008, with a variety of REITs struggling to find financing for new projects, tenants for old buildings, and the cash to pay for operations. While many names in this sector have plunged, others have [...]
Equity markets started October in much the same way they began last month; higher thanks to solid data. The Dow and S&P 500 both gained roughly 0.4% while the tech heavy Nasdaq rose by a more modest 0.1%. Precious metals and other commodities also soared as gold continued its march higher, finishing the day at [...]
U.S. equity markets had a choppy Friday to close out the week, as all the major equity markets managed to finish in positive territory despite a steep drop to start the day off. Oil again finished the day lower, this time by close to $1/bbl. as the U.S. dollar finished mostly flat against the major [...]
With many equity markets plunging around the globe, investors are flocking towards safe-haven investments. This flight to quality has left many investors piling into U.S. Treasury bonds and the U.S. dollar in general. This has helped to sink commodity prices and send T-Bill yields lower decreasing the desirability of each substantially as asset classes to [...]
The showdown over the future of the financial industry continued in Washington on Tuesday, as former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker continued to push for restrictions on commercial banks engaging in proprietary trading and private investing activity. Earnings reports continued to give domestic equity markets a boost, as did favorable news for the U.S. auto [...]
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 [...]
