Banking

The gold rush in frontier markets for both investors and enterprising ETF sponsors has officially begun. Some investors will experience huge windfall profits, while many will see the promises of wealth turn empty. While risk aversion is still in play domestically, 2009 proved that investors were still willing to ante up on high-risk, high reward [...]

Following a bullish start to 2010, a quick three-day plunge shows investors are still playing defensively. Investors placed bearish put option bets worth more than $1.2 billion in stock on several top exchange-traded funds. A total of 400,000 contracts were traded in the Materials Select Sector SPDR fund (XLB: Quote, Profile, Advanced Chart, News), the [...]

As the world economy weakens through nearly two years of recession, China’s stimulus driven economy is exploding in every direction. A growing export economy has exerted a tremendous impact on the boom, which has covered all sectors of the Chinese economy, including real estate. Chinese exports rose 17.7% year over year against 55.9% growth in [...]

Volume on US Treasury ETFs grew 10% higher than the average as investors took bets on how this week’s record issuance would be received by investors. The Treasury will auction a record of $118 billion in debt this week alone. Today, the US Treasury auctioned $44 billion worth of two-year notes to strong bidding from [...]

Despite their growing appeal to the casual investor, exchange-traded funds still owe half their assets to investments from institutional investors. Federal filings by exchange-traded fund companies and larger investors indicate that sophisticated investors owned $250 billion of a total of $497 billion invested in American ETFs by the end of 2008. In its own study, [...]

PIMCO took another step to solidify its exchange-traded fund business by pushing two recent filings to the market. Its newest two funds launched on October 22. The first of the two funds is the PIMCO 20+ Year Zero Coupon U.S. Treasury Index Fund (ZROZ), which will track the B of A Merrill Lynch Long Treasury [...]

Although exchange-traded funds aren’t considered luxury vehicles like hedge funds and bank debentures, they’re rapidly coming into favor among wealthy investors. Their low cost, liquidity, and convenient tax structure find a niche in the portfolio of many wealthy stock investors. One of the biggest drivers of growth for exchange-traded funds among wealthy investors is the [...]

State Street Global Advisors has launched a new preferred stock exchange-traded fund, which hopes to benefit from the recent change in tide in the credit markets. Known as the SPDR Wells Fargo Preferred Stock ETF (PSK: Quote, Profile, Advanced Chart, News), the fund will hold a basket of preferred stocks. Preferred stock ETFs have been [...]

Emerging Global Advisors is set to launch a new exchange-traded fund which taps into two sectors already very popular with investors: emerging markets and financial stocks. The fund will rely on the newly created Dow Jones Emerging Markets Financial Titans Index as its underlying index. Emerging Global Advisors will be releasing the fund under the [...]

Rather than create leveraged ETFs, banks are finding it easier to create structured products that leverage investments on the investor’s end, instead of leveraging on the ETF’s end. The new products, which stand to benefit from poor publicity surrounding leveraged ETFs, are more like exchange-traded notes than ETFs. JP Morgan has introduced a new structured [...]