Investing

International Real Estate ETF Launched

17 years ago
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With an expense ratio of .6% the Boston-based State Street Corp listed the StreetTracks Dow Jones Wilshire International Real Estate ETF (RWX) on the American Stock Exchange.

Personal Finance Magazines Influenced by Advertisers

17 years ago
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The independence of editorial content from advertisers’ influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. Jonathan Reuter and Eric Zitzewitz tested whether this independence is observed in practice. They found that mutual fund recommendations are correlated with past advertising in three personal [...]

Corporate Bonds Most Overpriced Asset

17 years ago
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Deviating slightly from his drumbeat that people should expect lower returns going forward, Bill Gross looks at whether there are any asset classes that look like they have no upside potential left. He ends up focusing on corporate bonds and decides that their spreads are within a few basis points [...]

Rethinking Your Investment Risk

18 years ago
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Economist Kotlikoff (progenitor of planning software ESPlanner) advocates that living standard risk must be taken into account when determining appropriate portfolio risk (which I happen to agree with :-). Those whose Social Security and other pensions provide the majority of their living expenses, [...]

Peak Oil – Pro and Con

18 years ago
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The peak oil folks have gotten fairly shrill the last year or two. And the oil industry has started their own campaign to counter some of the assertions being made. For those of you who don’t follow this debate, peak oil refers to the the point in time when the world production of oil (i.e., [...]

18 years ago
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A marketing blitz on new mortgage accelerator programs has been hitting us in Hawaii lately. After having a handful of people, who should have known better, asked me to take a look at the program before they signed up, I realized I needed to get the word out about their misleading marketing [...]

November 2006 Savings Bond Rates

18 years ago
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The new fixed rate for I-Bonds is 1.4%. Since the EE bonds went to fixed rates (3.6% currently) and since the real rates on I-bonds have fallen substantially below those on TIPs (which are over 2.5% for the 5 year TIPs), the attractiveness of these tools is much reduced. Which is too bad. They [...]

Dead Funds Suck Life from Investors’ Returns

18 years ago
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Paul Farrell reminds us about the effects of survivorship bias “Out of 2,071 equity funds, over one-third (725) were killed off between 1962 and 1995. Dig the vampires out of the graves and the average category returns sink 1.3% below their indexes.”

Inflation Boogeyman

18 years ago
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Happy Halloween! Today I have a collection of items concerning inflation (one of the boogeymen for retirees). This article examines CPI across the world. It discusses the differences in the basket of goods used in different countries and how consumers in developing nations change their purchasing [...]

Commodities fever is spoiling returns

18 years ago
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A cautionary article in the Economist on investing in commodities. So much money has flowed into commodity investments recently that the dynamic that held in the past no longer exists and those who are counting on it to continue will likely be disappointed. There have been numerous studies showing [...]
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