A seemingly endless string of interest rate hikes (unlucky 13) and bank reserve increases killed India ETFs in 2011. In fact, investors may not have feared inflation as much as they feared that the Reserve Bank of India would go too far. Yet a shift in central bank policy bias towards easing has given emerging market watchers reason to [...] Continue Reading...
My clients have benefited from a healthy slice of exposure to risk in 2012. Top ETF holdings include assets like SPDR S&P China (GXC), Vanguard Dividend Growth (VIG), iShares High Yield Corporate (HYG) and Vanguard Growth (VUG). My income-oriented winners like JP Morgan Alerian MLP (AMJ) and PowerShares CEF Income (PCEF) have been noticably slower on the [...] Continue Reading...
Regardless of what the Bureau of Labor reports on Friday (3/9/2012), job market conditions in the U.S. may actually be softening. For the last 3 weeks, new jobless claims have headed higher. What’s more, Gallup’s unemployment and underemployment measures show net job gains on the decline. Considering the fact that voters continue to rank the economy as the number [...] Continue Reading...
Renewed fears over Thursday’s deadline for Greece’s debt swap with private bondholders served as the excuse. The truth is… the price of the S&P 500 had lived more than one standard deviation above a 50-day moving average since the last trading day of 2011; stocks were nearly certain to pull back. And it’s not like warning lights [...] Continue Reading...
Back in 2009, a flood of easy money worldwide sparked super-sized gains for the emerging markets… more so than their developed world counterparts. Granted, stock assets for industrialized and developing regions were both remarkable. Yet the best investment profits involved commodities, materials and rapid-fire economies with the most “stuff.” By mid-2010, the industrializing world found itself tightening fiscal and monetary policies to curtail runaway [...] Continue Reading...
There’s a tendency for many writers, analysts and money managers to lump all industrializing nations into a single entity. For better or worse, the popularity of Vanguard Emerging Markets (VWO) and iShares MSCI Emerging Markets (EEM) illustrates the way the developed world chooses to invest money. (Heck, Jim Cramer recently described the investing environment in terms of a 4-legged [...] Continue Reading...
In 2011, the S&P 500 began the year with remarkable fanfare. The benchmark raked in 2.4% in January alone. And yet, in 2012, the S&P 500 has been even more impressive, snagging an eye-popping 4.4%. The reasons for the risk-on gains may be easy to identify, from the notion that U.S. economic prospects are improving to the feeling that Europe will contain [...] Continue Reading...
Copper is one of the world’s most popular metals. It is used in everything from water pipes to radiators to air conditioning systems. Some will say that the industrial metal posesses a Ph.D. in economics… it is that critical to world GDP growth. One country alone is responsible for about 40% of the world’s copper reserves and roughly 35% of copper [...] Continue Reading...
LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate) is the interest rate that fellow European banks will charge other banks. Put another way, it is the rate at which a financial institution in the region can borrow money. In order for banks to operate, they are consistently lending out and/or borrowing. If they cannot exchange with one another, required reserve levels could be deemed “inadequate” or investors could [...] Continue Reading...
The prospects for corporate earnings haven’t mattered much to the markets in 2011. Instead, European debt news drives stocks dramatically higher or lower. Last week, stock assets tanked on less-than-anticipated demand for Italian bonds. This week, stocks skyrocket on better-than-expected desire for Spanish bonds. Traders used to profit from this kind of volatility. They haven’t been doing [...] Continue Reading...
