State Of The Union Address
Politics aside, seriously, politics aside has there ever been an emptier State of the Union address? I was expecting a lot of empty we oughtas but there was barely even that. No joke, am I remembering past speeches incorrectly? I can't believe how empt...
What Should Come Next In ETFs? Part Deux
Well I was not expecting a followup to yesterday's post, well not today anyway, but it is appropriate. Perhaps coincidentally to yesterday's post or perhaps not I had a conversation with a honcho at one of the ETF providers and while the conversation n...
If You Ever Want To Retire, Don’t Follow This Advice
The above was the original title of my latest exclusive post at Seeking Alpha that I hope you can check out. Here is the excerpt;I read what I’ll call an odd blog post with a unique idea for retirement investing. As much as I disagree with the post t...
What Should Come Next In ETFs?
In the last few days there have been a couple of posts touching on the idea of what direction the ETF industry might go in; one from Mebane Faber revisiting a wish list from four years ago and the other by Richard Bloch from Zecco noting that iShares i...
Sunday Morning Coffee
Felix Zulauf at the Barron's Roundtable: In the U.S., annual consumption of meat is 130 kilograms (286 pounds) per capita. In the European Union it is about 100 kilos. In China it is 55 kilos, and it was 39 kilos 10 years ago. In India it is at only se...
The Big Picture for the Week of January 23, 2011
Joseph Shaefer had a post up at Seeking Alpha on foreign investing that offered a lousy acronym (sorry Joe) but a great discussion topic for building the developed-foreign part of an equity portfolio. To read the article he favors Australia, Switzerlan...
Steve McQueen & Bond ETFs
Awhile back the ETF provider now known as Guggenheim listed an ETF line called BulletShares for corporate bonds which allowed investors to access a specific maturity date such that with the BulletShares 2014 Corporate Fund (BSCE) the bonds held in the ...
Learning From Tunisia
Charles Kirk kicked off yesterday's daily email with a quote from Seth Klarman from the Baupost Group as follows; "The best investors in the world do not target returns; they focus first on risk." The quote appeals to me intellectually and it is also r...
How to Stop Worrying and Love ETFs
I have another Seeking Alpha exclusive posted. Here is the excerpt;An in-depth investigation at one of the stock market television networks has uncovered that some ETFs have large weightings in individual stocks, which at times can be problematic for f...
Wednesday Twofer
Yesterday at the gym I saw a guy on the treadmill with a Walkman-like device that looked older than the one pictured to the left. He had cassettes and everything to pop into that thing; truly old school.While this is not the most efficient way to liste...
Frontier Markets
I meant to get to this before but a while back Dow Jones redid their country classification such that they now recognize countries as being frontier (apparently this is new for them). This is interesting and you can see below how they divide up the cou...
Active Management With Passive Investment Products
I took advantage of the day off to do a little extra writing with another Seeking Alpha exclusive that takes issue with another SA author's conclusions about how to use ETFs. The excerpt;A recent article on Seeking Alpha by Tim Ayles made an unusual ar...
