There may be 33 million people in Canada. All of them, and perhaps most of the world’s citizens, may have cheered its gold medal victory over the Americans in the 2010 Winter Olympics. Yet investors have been cheering Canada on for years with iShares MSCI Canada (EWC) outperforming the S&P 500 SPDR Trust (SPY) in the previous decade. In [...] Continue Reading...
According to Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at S&P Equity Research, bull markets typically reclaim as much as 4/5 of bear market losses in the inaugural year. Using this historical logic, the S&P 500 should have made it as far as 1385, not merely 1140. Stovall sees this underachieving bull… one that has recaptured about 1/2 of its losses from the [...] Continue Reading...
I think there’s a television program called, “Million Dollar Listing.” I’ve never seen it. Instead, I find myself in scores of conversations with real estate professionals. And if you speak to enough of them about their industry, your head will start to spin. The optimists will tell you that the overall sales volume trend has picked up considerably, [...] Continue Reading...
If we’re close to seeing 1000 U.S. exchange-traded products, what percentage of those ETFs or ETNs represent Apple (AAPL)? The answer is… 10%. There are more than 100 ETFs with exposure to tech’s best-known innovator. Most broad-based large-cap ETFs may have a 2% weighting. A variety of tech ETFs target 6%-8%. Yet there are number of [...] Continue Reading...
It’s been a spectacular week for the bulls… no doubt about it. Both the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 gained ground in all 5 trading sessions. In fact, the iShares Russell 2000 (IWM) hit fresh 52-week highs, closing in on territory not seen since the Lehman bankruptcy (9/2008). Some attribute the new-found desire for stock assets to better-than-anticipated jobs numbers [...] Continue Reading...
Two days ago, I wrote an editorial on “dividend aristocrats.” I can’t remember the exact reason that I chose to write the column on dividend ETFs on that particular day. However, I did want to discuss exerting greater control over your portfolio’s performance. “Aristocrats” represent companies that have increased payouts for 25 consecutive years. Yet there’s no ETF that tracks the S&P Dividend Aristocrats Index. Instead, [...] Continue Reading...
Nobody “feels” like things are getting better. Bearishness pops up in discussions of euro devaluation, gold appreciation, China inflation, Japan deflation and U.S. stagnation. Unfortunately, it’s our ‘feelings” as human beings that derails us; in fact, when analysts pass off their emotionality as unbiased assessment, it often prompts investors to sell lower and buy higher. Of course there are problems out [...] Continue Reading...
If you’re like me, you get a whole lot of financial e-junk… spam filter or not. Yet one marketing pitch for an e-letter did sneak into my “Must Read” box last week. Here’s a brief synopsis from the sales plug: China used to be one of the hottest markets in the world. But not anymore. The iShares [...] Continue Reading...
“Even the heavens rain on a dog’s arse some days.” — Anonymous Are there going to be bear markets? Of course there are, and we’ve seen some doozies. The last decade gave us two wealth-destructing stock bears — the infamous 2000-2002 dot-com disaster as well as the 2008 credit collapse. In fact, another bear could happen [...] Continue Reading...
In the 70s, buy-n-hold investors in the U.S. didn’t experience capital gains for 16 years (1966-1982); they didn’t see any cap app for the 10 years (2000-2009) of the last decade either. That’s why dividend enthusiasts like to remind the “easy money” crowd that you can’t count on prices going higher. However, you may be able to count on cash flow or [...] Continue Reading...
