April 2013

Risk Aversion Applies to More Than Just Investing

April 30, 2013

I’m sometimes confounded by people who say they are very conservative investors and are unwilling to take on the routine equity volatility risk that is, well, pretty much necessary to beat inflation these days.  Yet at the same time, they carry no insurance of any sort for all the various unforeseen events and maladies that […]

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Media is Red Hot for Good Reasons

April 28, 2013

Netflix (NFLX) may be this year’s best performer as a provider of internet TV, but investors are seeing impressive gains in media as a whole. PowerShares Dynamic Media Portfolio (PBS) ranks among several leveraged funds and Japanese equity ETFs as a top YTD performer. The fund tracks an index of 32 different media companies, most […]

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How Far Should Investors Go in the Quest for Diversification

April 26, 2013

One of the key tenants of successful investing is proper diversification.  But can diversifying assets and classes be taken to such an extreme that it’s detrimental to returns?  Back when I was a more active investor trading individual stocks on a more routine basis, I used to question the wisdom of professional fund managers owning […]

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A Low(er) Volatility Mid Cap Fund

April 21, 2013

When iShares isn’t too busy leading the world of exchange traded products, it’s designing new funds to take public. One of its newest launches, the MSCI USA Size Factor ETF (SIZE) could be a winner given its focus as a new, lower volatility mid cap ETF. This new ETF from iShares will track the MSCI […]

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Gold is Out – Is the Fear Trade Over?

April 14, 2013

This week gold entered bear market territory, plunging by more than 20% from the market highs set in 2011. Gold also lost its correlation to equities, seeing as the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) is off by 10% while equities, as measured by the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), are up 12%. Is the gold rush […]

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Japanese Stocks are In Play: Should You Follow?

April 8, 2013

The Bank of Japan is engaged in the most aggressive quantitative easing in the world (here’s what happened previously to ETFs that went wild following US QE Announcements). If you thought Ben Bernanke’s asset purchases were something, you’ll see the Bank of Japan as a lunatic. After the election of Shinzo Abe, investors moved boatloads […]

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