Roughly one hour before bond and stock markets closed on Monday, 7/25/11, congressional Democrats expressed that the House Republican debt plan was a “non-starter” in the Senate. Wince! Six hours later, President Obama spoke to the American people about a potential catastrophe that could see interest rates on credit cards, mortgages and car loans skyrocket. [...] Continue Reading...
At the end of April, most domestic and world equity benchmarks had hit new highs for 2011. The S&P 500 finished at 1363 — roughly 8.4% higher on the year. By May 31, the U.S. stock gauge had dropped to 1345. And nearing the end of June, the heralded index drifted down to 1290. As far as [...] Continue Reading...
Over the last six months, no sector investment racked up more gains than health care. The iShares Health Care Providers Fund (IHF) amassed 21.5%. Rydex Equal Weight Health (RYH) proffered 14.6%. And SPDR S&P Biotech (XBI) promised 12.7%, even as the broader S&P 500 SPDR Trust (SPY) chimed in with a less sonic 4.7%. Some Health Care ETFs look even [...] Continue Reading...
This past Saturday, Former Minnesota governor and presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty addressed a group of conservatives in Minneapolis. According to a variety of news sources, he stated, ”If China can have 5% growth and India can have 5% growth and Brazil can have 5% growth, the United States can have 5% growth.” On the numbers, Tim Pawlenty is wrong… really [...] Continue Reading...
Can you name the developed country that hasn’t experienced a recession in close to 20 years? It’s Australia. And not only did the land “down under” weather the dot-com disaster that ushered in the 21st century, the nation also made it through the global credit collapse of 2008. Equally worthy of note, Australia was the first developed world sovereignty to raise [...] Continue Reading...
Even the bulls have been hedging their commentary lately. For example, Blackrock’s Bob Doll frequently points to accommodative monetary policy, strong corporate results and an increasingly self-sustaining economy as reasons for stocks to grind higher. More recently, though, the chief equity strategist acknowledged economic malaise by philosophizing, “A significant acceleration or deceleration in the pace of jobs growth has [...] Continue Reading...
The emerging market growth story is beautiful in its simplicity. Younger people with increasing amounts of income in industrializing countries should drive demand for more products, services, infrastructure and housing. Of course, the emergers are not without their concerns. They face more vexing inflation than developed economies. They’re more dependent on the natural resources they can or cannot export. [...] Continue Reading...
Two years ago, Van Eck’s Market Vectors made a big splash with its introduction of Small Cap Brazil (BRF). It was the second highly anticipated small cap country fund, as Claymore’s (Guggenheim) Small Cap China (HAO) had been an instantaneous success. Of course, the investment community didn’t embrace every small country offering with unbridled fervor. For instance, WisdomTree’s [...] Continue Reading...
Riding the China equity wave since the 3rd week of February hasn’t been that difficult. There have been dozens of reasons — fundamental, technical, contrarian, historical — to revisit the mainland. (See “3 More Reasons To Rethink Your China Allocation.”) On the other hand, selecting the best exchange-traded fund for the job may not have been as [...] Continue Reading...
For years, I’ve had a running “beef” with Morningstar’s one-dimensional presentations of overvalued and undervalued ETFs. (See Overvalued and Undervalued ETFs: Eye of the Beholder.) Specifically, the popular web portal uses a fundamental approach for determining a fund’s intrinsic worth. The method ignores history, seasonality, technical data, contrarian data, oil, interest rates, economics, current events and [...] Continue Reading...
