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ETF Base: Every alternative has its costs. Exchange-traded funds make investing less expensive, arguably less thoughtful, and certainly much less profitable for the investment management industry. From the perspective of an individual investor, these are all very good things. Read more…
Michael Johnston: Direxion, one of the largest issuers of leveraged and inverse ETFs, announced the addition of a non-leveraged ETF this week that will offer a unique way to access one of the world’s most widely-followed benchmarks. The new NASDAQ-100 Equal Weighted Index Shares Read more…
Michael Johnston: Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been one of the best performing stocks of the last several years, and has also become one of the most widely followed companies ever. The stock has been climbing sharply higher, recently piercing through the $600 level–a feat that just a few years ago Read more…
I guess not much has changed in the land of actively managed funds over the last several years. In 2006, former Investment U Chairman, Mark Skousen wrote, “80% of actively managed funds fail to beat the market.” Fast-forward to last year, and TIME Magazine reports, Read more…
Michael Johnston: As indexes have been essentially transformed into investable assets in part because of surging interest in ETFs, many advisors and investors have begun to take a closer look at Read more…
Jared Cummans: SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:SPY) has long been the king of exchange traded products. Hitting the market in 1993, this fund has amassed nearly $100 billion in assets making it not only the largest ETF in the world, but also one of the largest funds available to investors. Its ultra low Read more…
Michael Johnston: In the universe of equity ETFs, market capitalization weighting strategies are incredibly dominant. The majority of the hundreds of domestic and international stock ETFs available Read more…
Joseph L. Shaefer: Western European and US governments share something in common: the US government thought certain favored donors, er, “financial institutions,” were too big to fail. That’s nothing new. The government, or US taxpayers, have been bailing out Wall Street and the big money center Read more…
Michael Johnston: The rapid expansion of the ETF industry has been one of the most important developments of the last several decades to financial professionals; as the lineup of exchange-traded products has surged past 1,300, financial advisors now have more tools in their toolkits than ever before to Read more…
Joseph L. Shaefer: “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes” The above quote, attributed to Mark Twain, has been used and misused to explain many things that did or did not occur and did or did not unfold according to historical precedent. A current favorite is to point out the similarities noted, thus Read more…
Jared Cummans: This year started off strong, as it looked like the economic recovery was finally gaining some steam. Major indexes trended upwards for the first seven months of the year, with the S&P 500 hitting 1,370 at its peak. It marked good progress as we exited the “Lost Decade” where most indexes finished where they Read more…
Jared Cummans: As the ETF industry has maintained its strong growth, investors have grown increasingly comfortable with establishing exposure to various markets utilizing the exchange-traded structure. Now, with 1,300+ funds in the space, there is an ETF for almost any investment Read more…
Thanks in part to the rise in popularity of exchange-traded funds in recent years, debate over the relative merits of various strategies for building and maintaining indexes has intensified considerably. The ETF boom has accelerated the transformation of benchmarks into investable Read more…
David Fry: This posting features a comprehensive review of the large cap ETF sector. To simplify matters for investors, and to be consistent with previous practices, we’ve highlighted what we feel are the top 10 choices in this category. Doing so makes sorting through the sector more manageable Read more…
Emerging markets have seen their importance to the global economy swell in recent years, as the developing markets of the world have become the primary drivers of growth not only in their home 
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