Not satisfied with having ushered in a new era of efficient, low cost, investment-savvy pooled investment products, ETF issuers insist on trying to reengineer their own (already pretty darn good) invention.
You'll usually find grandparents are a willing audience, especially if you first ask them to tell you about their grandchildren, and listen patiently for the next 90 minutes. But for those grandparents with several million or more in net worth, a...
You'd think the U.S. dollar had bitten the dust from all the breathless reporting of its savaging in the foreign exchange market. From the headlines, you'd think the world was selling dollars in 2008 en masse. But it's been worse. Consider that...
Active versus passive? That's an old battle. But the stakes have recently been raised: Can the S&P 500 beat a portfolio of funds of hedge funds? Warren Buffet says yes, when performance is measured net of fees, costs and expenses, and he's putting...
It’s earnings season, and with Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley kicking it off this week, many investors will be asking themselves: Is the financial crisis over? (Or, at least, is it winding down?) The smart money at the sovereign...
When it Began, the credit crisis had little to do with retail brokerage. After all, the fixed income departments were the ones who made the bad mortgage bets that have since unraveled, resulting in a pileup of more than $200 billion dollars in...
Are closed-end fund preferred-auction securities safe? We consider CFPs to be the conservative's conservative security. Defaults are even rarer than failed auctions. We are comfortable with the safety of auction securities from closed-end funds...
Wall Street is shifting loyalties. So far in the 2008 election cycle, the securities and investment industry has showered the Democratic Party with contributions. The balance began to shift in 2006, when the industry gave 53 percent of donations...
When the search for alpha takes conservative portfolios such as the Harvard and Yale endowments into the land of bellies, beans and bullion, investors and their advisors take notice. Consider that David Swensen, in charge of Yale's portfolio (and...
