January 2012

Municipal Rally – Oh How Meredith Was Wrong

January 30, 2012

In 2010 one brave analyst took to 60 minutes to give deliver a warning message: municipalities are broke. Meredith Whitney made a very controversial call, declaring state and local governments a poor place to invest. In particular, she noted her expectations for the future of the municipal bond market which included hundreds of billions of […]

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Have ETFs Reached a Saturation Point?

January 13, 2012

I caught an article over a SeekingAlpha quoting the Financial Times in highlighting that perhaps the ETF market has become saturated.  I’ve been saying for some time that the new issues coming out seemingly weekly are becoming more inane and bizarre by the issue.  Much seems to be more about marketing and getting a trendy […]

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Strategy to Combine High Dividend Yields, Options Income and Price Stability

January 8, 2012

I came across an interesting article on SeekingAlpha where the author suggests a strategy for exploiting the high yields of the Dogs of the Dow (I recently wrote on the 2012 Dogs of the Dow) mixed with selling long-dated options (LEAPS) on those positions. Using Dow stocks also tends to minimize the risk of outright […]

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Best Performing ETFs of 2011 – Leveraged and Traditional Classes

January 1, 2012

With 2011 wrapping up, we saw US indices close roughly flat on the year (slight gain on the Dow and a huge move for the Dogs of the Dow especially, at 17%), but global markets swooned, especially those in the developing world and Europe.  It shouldn’t come as a major surprise then, that the major […]

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