Wall Street started the trading week on an upbeat note after news of
Osama bin Laden’s death on Sunday night sparked optimism in the dollar and pushed overseas markets broadly higher. Speculators were quick to sell gold, silver, and oil in the futures market overnight, but the reaction was overdone and the three hot commodities were quick to find support and work their way back up during NYSE trading hours on Monday. Oil has been slowly rising since its last violent sell-off earlier in mid-April, and crude futures are once again eying the $115 level as May contracts soared past $114 a barrel at the market open [see
Thursday’s ETF Chart To Watch: SPDR S&P Oil & Gas ETF (XOP)].
[click to continue…]
The last week of April was a pretty solid one for markets as equities rose broadly throughout the week to finish the month at fresh highs. While a number of earnings reports were key to the positive investor sentiment, arugably the biggest news story of the week came from the Federal Reserve meeting on Wednesday. In [...]
Thanks to inflationary pressures and booming emerging markets, a number of key commodities have seen their values soar so far in 2011. While this trend has been especially pronounced in the energy and food commodity markets, precious metals have also been a huge beneficiary of the movement as many traders and investors have piled into [...]
This shortened trading week saw markets take a wild ride, as a slew of data sent major indexes through major ups and downs. The week began with Standard and Poor’s downgrading U.S. debts, causing markets as a whole to endure a rough trading day on Monday. But as the week continued, positive earnings from major [...]
As interest in achieving exposure to commodities has increased in recent years, various issuers have introduced exchange-traded products designed to access this potentially attractive asset class. While assets have flowed into exchange-traded products that offer exposure to natural resources prices through futures contracts and physical commodities, ETFs that invest in stocks of the companies engaged [...]
Wall Street advanced cautiously on Monday and major indexes were trading flat for the majority of the session. Investors have a round of central bank meetings and economic data to digest this week, and likewise, trading will be heavily influenced by forward looking commentary regarding interest rates, inflation, and growth. To kick the week off, [...]
ETFs have been praised for improving the investing experience in a number of different ways. They have been the catalyst for a shift towards low cost indexing strategies, and have placed strong downward pressure on management fees throughout the investing landscape. They have improved tax efficiencies and intraday liquidity, allowing investors to move in and [...]
February marked another month of growth for the U.S. ETF industry, though the pace of inflows slowed a bit from recent months. According to data from the National Stock Exchange assets stood at $1.055 trillion at the end of February, an increase of about 3.5% over the previous month. February inflows totaled $7.4 billion, down [...]
It doesn’t seem like that long ago that exchange-traded commodity products were the darlings of the ETF world. Praised for democratizing an entire asset class (and one capable of delivering non-correlated returns to investors at that), commodity ETFs saw billions of dollars of cash inflows in 2009. Investors rushed to get their hands on everything [...]
Last week we highlighted several often-overlooked nuances of popular exchange-traded products, detailing the surprisingly large impact that seemingly minor distinctions can have on a portfolio’s risk/return profile. From the weighting methodology employed by the underlying index to the choice between large caps and small caps for international equity exposure, many details that are often the [...]
Last year was a good year for most asset classes, as investor portfolios continued to recover from the recent recession. The difference in performance between many comparable funds was significant, and many of the best performers of 2010 are relatively small funds that maintain considerably smaller asset bases than their more popular competitors. Below, we [...]
