ETF Conference
It was a pretty easy (direct) flight from Phoenix to Fort Lauderdale and I got in early enough to sit in on a little bit of the ETF 101 panel and the Advanced ETF Workshop and was there long enough to make a couple of interesting observations.In the ET...
Sunday Morning Coffee
A reader asks;You seem to cite CNBC and Barrons frequently and occasionally the WSJ. You do mention other investment blogs like Seeking Alpha etc. It seems as if you only refer to the mass media in your commentaries.I can't think of very many instances...
The Big Picture for the Week of February 6, 2011
A heckler left a stupid comment (that I did not allow to be published) on a post from 2005. And while the comment was stupid the post was interesting and one I did not remember. The post was short, here it is in its entirety;CNBC Asia had a very intere...
Global X Andean Fund
Global X launched its Andean ETF with ticker symbol AND. It is 49% Chile, 29% Colombia and 22% Peru.This is an important and attractive part of world, in my opinion. I'll have more on this later. Apparently there are no Bolivian toll road stocks in the...
It Turns Out It Would Be Really Easy to Issue Foreign Bond ETFs
For a while I've been writing about the importance of foreign fixed income exposure in a diversified portfolio, how we integrate this space into our client portfolios and how easy it would be for ETF providers to make real inroads here in offering expo...
It Would Be Worse If You Didn’t Know
On Monday I tweeted rhetorically whether the Fed was bigger than Egypt as US equities seemed to have shrugged off whatever might be the consequence from the Egypt story. This was confirmed by an even bigger lift in the market on Tuesday. As a quick cla...
The Concept of a "Number" for Retirement is Completely Bogus
Early in the day yesterday Carrie Pomerantz-Schwab from Charles Schwab INC and Barry Rand from AARP came on CNBC to talk about a new partnership to help people better prepare for retirement. In citing all sorts of grim statistics about how unprepared p...
The Everyman Hedge Fund
My latest Seeking Alpha exclusive has been posted. The excerpt;Barron’s had an article over the weekend called Attack of the Hedge Fund Clones. The concept has grown in terms of AUM and proliferation of funds. ETF provider IndexIQ was early to market...
Personal Finance Hobgoblins
The Trader Column in this week's Barron's devoted a lot of pixels to personal finance issues which is somewhat unusual. The first bit was in making the case for Financial Engines (FNGN) with some grim retirement-preparedness stats.The article rightly n...
Sunday Morning Coffee
This week's Barron's featured the final installment of the Barron's roundtable which included Marc Faber's picks. I find his commentary in this event to be most useful for what I'm trying to do in terms of learning about new (to me) niches or maybe lea...
The Big Picture for the Week of January 30, 2011
After a week or so of lead time things in Egypt obviously escalated on the ground in Cairo which appeared to have a meaningful impact on equity prices in Friday's session.Of most interest to me was that despite the slide in gold this year, at the point...
Well, The Market Is Up 95%
The US stock market is up 95% in less than two years. No matter anything else in terms of perceived fundamentals, Fed action, ongoing threats the fact remains that the market is up 95% from where it was in March 2009. Whether or not people should feel ...
