etfs

weekly market update focusing on Exchange Traded Funds and Sector Rotation

Weekly update of market action, hot sectors and exchange traded funds, outlook for the week ahead

Until relatively recently, currency trading was the domain of the exotic Forex markets but now individual investors can participate in the currency and foreign exchange markets using Exchange Traded Funds.

Several ETF providers offer exposure to the currency markets and in this article we’re going to take a look at what’s available to investors interested in this market.

Using the PSW Alert system we were able to make 68% trading DIA, the Dow's ETF using a simple call option and the levels set by our system.

We walk you through this process, step by step, show you the levels we are watching for tomorrow and give you a 2 trade ideas, one of which has the potential to return 285% by next Friday.

Interested?

Just because you can trade some ETFs now without paying any commissions, are you really getting a sweet deal?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is one of the most widely-followed stock indexes in the world, seen as a barometer of U.S. equity market performance. The rise of the ETF industry has given investors the option to track the performance of this benchmark, and a number of spin-offs have increased ETF options for investing in the Dow.

“As assets in U.S. exchange-traded funds hit a record of more than $700 billion last year, ETF providers are sprouting faster than you can say ETF boom. Indeed, there are now nearly 30,” Sheryl Nance-Nash Reports From Daily Finance.

SPDR KBW Regional Banking (NYSEArca: KRE) offers investors a direct play on this subsector of the financial industry. We like the diversification benefits this ETF offers and think that investors looking to bet on a recovery in this beaten-down subsector should consider KRE as a tactical satellite holding,” Scott Burns Reports From The Money Show.

Oh look. The devil cries too.

If you can believe it, there are actually some people out there who still think the long end of the yield-curve can go lower. In fact, some people believe it can drop to new records — below those of the 1940s. But that’s just pure, unadulterated, old-fashioned nonsense.

Here are a few reasons why quantitative easing is never going to work, and won’t take us anywhere near historical lows:

As the ETF industry has expanded in recent years, a significant portion of growth has come from the tremendous rise in popularity of exchange-traded commodity products. In addition to broad-based funds such as DBC or DJCI, several commodity-specific products have accumulated billions of dollars in assets, and several were even among the very largest of all ETFs at the end of 2009.

The Select Sector SPDR ETFs divide the S&P 500 into nine sector index funds. These ETFs allow retail investors to employ strategies that were once available only to the pros. They offer investors flexibility in creating portfolios with customized asset allocations at low costs.

The title says "How", but the article also has a significant amount of "Why". I'm using ETFs to efficiently diversify & hedge my portfolio. The author also points out something that I've found to be true: when you use ETFs to diversify, it gives you freedom to research & invest in a few stellar individual stocks.

Leverage ETFs can allow you to make amazing returns in just a little time, but, with so much risk, are they really a good investment choice?

There has been a lot of debate across the news channels and media about whether we are due for a pullback, whether the markets have superficially shot up about 50 percent, whether this is a robust recovery or whether we will flatten out and see this “inverse square root” recovery.

Yesterday on CNBC, Ron Insana (who is now my colleague at theStreet.com even though I’m quite certain he’s never read anything I’ve ever written) commented that individual investors should not be speculating in the currency markets using leverage and futures products. He seemed to be saying that even currency ETFs probably are unnecessary as well.