ETFS

A popular recent article in the New York Times suggested that Americans who aren’t saving enough for retirement can blame Wall Street’s high fees on investment products for their shortfall. We can’t dismiss our culpability entirely. The current national savings rate posted by the Federal Reserve hovers around 5%, not nearly enough to fund our

Most of us are holding too much cash in our portfolios and not enough stocks, but the worst offenders of all are the youngest investors. This means you, millennials. A 2014 UBS survey reports that the public continues to avoid the stock market, but that the youngest investors are even more conservative than the older

This is just not normal.  Nearly 90% of the industrialized world economy is presently anchored by zero rates, and half of all government bonds in the world today yield less than 1%. Wow. The race into risky assets continues, but those assets are bid up and richly priced. Evans Ambrose-Pritchard wrote, “Stephen King from HSBC

Updated rankings are out. Go to Best ETFs 2017: Long-term Bonds. In this category the iShares ETF family lands in the top spot for cost efficiency, with its 7-10 Year Treasury Bond fund (IEF), and in the lead for assets, with iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond (LQD). Long bonds offer some prospect of real

A lot of financial advisors like to talk about “insurance” for their clients’ investments. Often, however, this takes the unlikely form of highly risky counter-investments. For instance, an advisor might choose a broad selection of blue-chip stocks. They pay a nice dividend and, assuming they are not too tightly concentrated, are pretty safe from causing a

Many value investors underperformed as the market soared over the past several years, but the tables may soon turn for quality, large-cap, liquid stocks, Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research analysts said this week. “These days, value investing has been replaced by a preference for ‘growth at any price. But over the very long

Steven A. Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management has made a big bet on Square, the payments processing startup created by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. The over $11 billion family office for Cohen’s fortune disclosed on Friday it now owns nearly 6.7 million Square shares, or 5.4% of the company’s outstanding stock. Most of Point72’s investment in

The volatility of the past 2 weeks has Goldman Sachs, and many others, selling stocks. Sam Miklosko is on the other side of that trade. In order to execute a simple strategy of buying low and selling high, you have to buy when prices are low. That means that when the bears come out, it’s

Christian Magoon, the CEO of Amplify ETFs, has something new up his sleeve. The newcomer to the space (four years in now) is devising a strategy that will weed out some of what he calls the “zombie ETFs” in the market. Magoon started Amplify in April 2016, though he’s been in the ETF world for

President Trump is eyeing cutting the Social Security payroll tax. If not replaced by another funding source, the move could kill the most popular inflation-adjusted retirement program. While putting money in workers’ pockets in the short term, nixing the payroll tax will undercut funding for the popular program and achieve the sinister goal of GOP

There are basically three ways to make money in this bad ole world: you either inherit it, you sell a lot of something very expensive and do very well at it, or you take risks. Enterpreneurs take risks on new companies. Investors take risk on markets. So when a crisis in Brazil heats up, as

I wish I could say that the Equifax hack debacle was resolved and everyone’s personal data was protected. That’s not the case. It may be months or even years before we know what happened and who stole what. There’s little doubt that some 143 million Americans are at risk. The company performed poorly, had awful

As I have noted in past columns, I have been charting stocks for more than three decades, and my personal belief is that analysis of chart patterns is an essential part of sizing up the tradeoff between reward and risk for investors at any point in the market cycle.  This does not mean that so-called

By James Zdralek, Senior Usability Design Expert, SAP What if the world ran on new classes of digital currency that are inflation resistant, create price stability, discourage bubbles and deflationary spirals? What if they could protect citizen’s savings without reducing liquidity when they save rather than spend? Rapid change will continue due to ongoing digital transformation.

At long last, Brazil is back and it will blow Mexico away next year as a relatively safe bet for growth in 2018, analysts from Morgan Stanley suggested in a report dated Dec. 8. Mexico’s been doing quite well, thanks to the strong U.S. economy that it depends on for nearly all of its exports.

The U.S. stock market was up 8% in three weeks, which is a little under half of what the S&P 500 did all last year. January marked the 22nd of the last 23 months that the market was higher in total return. It’s almost impossible today to make a bear case for anything except for,

Watch Now Jon Maier, Chief Investment Officer, Global X sat down with Julie Cooling, Founder & CEO, RIA Channel to discuss their suite of income, thematic, country funds, and factor-based ETFs. Maier moved to Global X from Merrill Lynch to offer his experience and knowledge of ETF model portfolio management. As the due diligence manager and gatekeeper

When I started cold calling for prospects at the Dean Witter Reynolds office on 17th Street in Denver in the early 80s, the 30-year municipal bonds I was pitching yielded 14%+ tax-free — without checking, I believe this was substantially more than is paid these days. I’d passed the securities exam and had just returned

For some, moments like these on Wall Street were made for the risk takers. National economic advisor Larry Kudlow warned the Fed about an inverted yield curve and what it means for the economy: in short, it means recession. The Fed is hiking. The market is thinking the economy will slow, and that’s pushing Treasury

The believers are hanging on for dear life.  The bull market is in its 9th year as of March, when it hit 666 in intraday trade on March 6, 2009…and hasn’t looked back since. If this keeps up for another 12 months, it will be the longest running bull market in history. BlackRock Investment Institute,

Global markets were volatile again last week. Here are some of the major movers and indicators that investors should be watching. As you read through, note that the breakdown in historical relationships between different markets can be just as important as a new high or low in price or value. Gold & U.S. Real Yields

These 2  very different markets have price charts that hit higher highs this week: the yield on the 10-year Treasury note and the price of oil, as seen in the actively traded West Texas futures contract. It had an almost synchronous feel Tuesday when both established fresh 52-week highs — if you followed along, you

Despite the failure this week of the NASDAQ Composite Index to make it to new highs, these 5 NASDAQ listed stocks all showed real strength by taking out previous peaks in price and establishing fresh multi-year highs: Points International is an internet information provider based in Canada. The stock hasn’t been this high since 2015.

History shows investors will stick with their mutual fund and Exchange Traded Fund holdings in the next downturn, Investment Company Institute Chair Ted Truscott asserted today. It’s a myth these investors are prone to panic when the markets go against them force and force funds to dump securities onto the market at fire-sale prices, Truscott

That’s “big dividends” in the relative sense. With the U.S. 10-year Treasury rate at 2.7%, then stocks paying more than a 4% dividend yield are of interest. An equity has more risk intrinsically than a government bond — if you’re willing to accept that, then you may find the higher yield a more attractive choice.

Elder financial abuse impacts millions of Americans each year, to an estimated tune of $2.9 billion annually. The financial exploitation of senior Americans is only going to continue to grow as scams targeting that segment of the population become more sophisticated. In an attempt to take a step towards countering some of the negative impact

European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi signaled that further rate cuts in the euro-zone are unlikely. That means rates are going higher sooner rather than later. Who is going to be the buyer of all that negative interest rate debt, nearly a trillion of it in the market according to Fitch. Negative to zero

The re-election of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff did not wipe out local asset prices as many predicted. And even though many investment firms see the Bovespa index eventually bottoming out at 46,000 points before rallying again, the story on the long-term is still out.  For now, a short honeymoon period with the new Dilma is

For years Boyar Research has offered up winning stock picks for value investors to study during the holidays when it publishes a list of 40 forgotten companies set to surge in the new year. Since Boyar Research began hunting for its so-called Forgotten Forty stocks, these picks have handily beaten the S&P 500 Index. The

Investors are bidding down the yields on bonds issued by highly rated countries around the world, causing German, Swiss, Japanese and Dutch 10-year bonds to offer negative yields. Lending to the United States for 10-years presently yields 1.35%, down from the 2%-plus rates they yielded at the end of 2015, even once risky governments like