These 31 funds are the cheapest for short-term stakes in short-term bonds. Shutterstock Do you have idle cash in your brokerage account? Chances are it’s not earning much. Consider switching to a brief investment in an exchange-traded fund that owns short-term bonds. The scorecard below shows the cheapest ETFs for a position held for three months.
Bonds
The author owns shares in AP Moeller-Maersk, CVS Health, Jardine Matheson, the PIMCO 15+ Year U.S. TIPS Index Fund and the SPDR Gold Trust. The trend is your friend is an investment adage that is usually associated with short term traders, employing technical analysis or other momentum strategies. It can also apply to thematic investors seeking to
Picture of 10.000 bolivar-bill taken in Caracas on July 26, 2018. – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on July 25 announced the removal of five zeroes from the country’s currency — two more than originally planned — amid hyperinflation the IMF said could reach one million percent this year. (Photo by Juan BARRETO / AFP) (Photo
Shutterstock The interest rate on the 10-year Treasury is trending higher every month that goes by. The price of oil is trending higher every month as well. This has been the case for a while now and I’m surprised that, so far, the stock market mostly continues on as if little of that mattered. I’m
Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin These 23 funds are the cheapest of their type for in-and-out trades. Shutterstock What does it cost to own the whole bond market for a brief period? This ranking tells you. The table scores exchange-traded funds for their three-month holding costs, defined to include the effect
Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Just a handful of long-term bond funds are cheap to own for a brief interval. Shutterstock If you want to make a bet on declining interest rates, shares in a fund that owns long-term bonds are a good option. This table ranks exchange-traded long-term bond funds on
Jerome Powell, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. The future actions of the Fed will have a key impact on bond markets. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg We’re now firmly into a rising interest rate cycle in the U.S. With several bond metrics approaching extremely levels relative to recent history, here are a few things to be aware of, and
Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin These 15 funds are the cheapest in their categories for short-term speculations. Shutterstock Owning a bond fund is one way to bet on a decline in interest rates. The table ranks the cheapest exchange-traded funds for three-month holding costs on a $10,000 investment. 3-month Holding Cost*
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is pictured during the left-wing Latin America Forum of São Paulo held in Havana on July 17, 2018. In a rare moment of honesty, Maduro blames himself and his party for the country’s crisis. (Photo by YAMIL LAGE / AFP) News flash! Socialism in poor, closed-door economies is a failure. So
When it comes to high-end U.S. real estate, there’s no shortage of skeptics who warn of nosebleed valuations and slim pickings of obvious bargains. And they’re probably right. Yet the two big money investors who capitalized on the buys that abounded after the financial crisis, Brookfield Asset Management and Blackstone Group, continue to churn out
Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg Iran’s rial plunged from 98,000 IRR/USD on Saturday to 112,000 IRR/USD on Sunday on Tehran’s Ferdowsi Street. That stunning 12.5% one-day plunge has pushed the rial into a classic death spiral. The last time the rial was in a grip of such a spiral was back in September 2012. The chart below shows
High-yield funds with rate hedges increase risk at worst possible time. (Photo by: MyLoupe/UIG via Getty Images) Often, simpler is better in finance and that definitely applies in the case of “hedged” high-yield funds. These funds own high-yield bonds with interest rate hedges. The three that I know of are HYGH (Blackrock) HYZD (WisdomTree) and
Shutterstock It’s fashionable to sneer at the conventional wisdom. Didn’t it tell us that the Iraq War would be a breeze? That Donald Trump would never be elected president? And in the financial realm, that damage from the unwinding of the housing craze in 2007 could be “contained”? Financial advisors tend to be custodians of
By Paunie Samreth and Reshmi Basu American Media Inc (AMI) executives have found themselves under a public microscope for their handling of sensitive information in 2016 about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. CEO David Pecker – “our friend David” in Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s recorded parlance – is fending off criticism for burying a story about Trump’s extramarital
The U.S. Treasuries yield curve is flattening. Just about every time this has happened in the past, the U.S. economy has tanked shortly afterwards. Yet the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has just told Congress that he intends to keep gradually raising interest rates “for now”. Is this time different? Jerome Powell, chairman of the
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol July 23, 2018 in Washington, D.C.. Pelosi, Rep. Adam Schiff (left) (D-CA) and Rep. Eliot Engel (right) (D-CA) have introduced a resolution condemning U.S. President Donald Trump’s statements during the recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. (Photo by
When the first read on second-quarter U.S. GDP data gets released Friday, its expected to be good enough to grab some big headlines. But no one is expecting the growth to be anywhere near as good as things got in the years under President Bill Clinton or those of President George W Bush. A battery pack is installed in a
Shutterstock For so long fixed-income investors have felt financially pressured to invest in real estate investment trusts (REITs), dividend-paying stocks and high yielding securities they never thought would fit their risk profiles. So why’d they do it? Because back then bond yields were so limbo-low. Fast forward to a more hawkish Federal Reserve. They promised
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at an event where he signed an executive order establishing a National Council for the American Worker. President Trump hosted leaders of the private sector to sign a Pledge to Americas Workers to create solutions to issues affecting the American labor force, and to create more than 500,000 opportunities for
I believe that the current threat of a prolonged trade war is serving as an emergency brake to a stock market that is pressing the gas pedal as hard as it can with positive economic data reports; including, but not limited to, corporate earnings, serving as tailwinds. Once any semblance of progress is reported with respect
If you’re a regular viewer of C-SPAN or CNBC, you probably know that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell visited the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, and delivered his economic outlook to members of the House of Representatives on Wednesday. The Fed chair’s semiannual monetary report to Congress has been required by the Humphrey–Hawkins Full
FILE: An employee works on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Co. Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S., on Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg Right now, trade wars are the greatest threat to global growth. And if President Trump implements the threat of tariffs on autos, it could be the tipping
Economists are predicting that the next recession will occur in or around 2020, as the Fed increases interest rates to tamp down an overheated economy, and the U.S. engages in a series of trade wars. Notably, the Trump Administration has more control of trade policy than the degree to which the economy overheats. So why
Retirement planning can be extremely complex. I often describe it as trying to hit a moving target in the wind. The target is moving because an individual does not know with any certainty the exact date retirement will begin or the duration of the retirement period. This means there is no way an individual can
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash Many of us are familiar with and follow the “120 minus your age” investing framework. It says that you should subtract your age from 120 and invest that percentage in equities, putting the rest in fixed income. For example, a 50-year-old would be 70% (120-50) in equities and 30% (100%-70%)
By Javier Balmaceda Rejected fiscal plans, dumped restructuring agreements, trashed projections: these are some of the fruits of three years of labor in Puerto Rico’s ongoing insolvency process. Ever since the US commonwealth entered default in 2015 it has paid external advisors hundreds of millions of dollars to produce reports and proposals that have done little to resolve the Gordian Knot that is its
State and local governments are struggling to keep their unfunded pension liabilities under control and are using misleading actuarial and pension fund performance assumptions to cover-up the severity of the problem. However, there is another huge gorilla of unfunded liabilities that many states and municipalities are also facing, namely “Other Post-Employment Benefit” (OPEB) liabilities. This
Charles Schwab & Co. takes the lead in offering bargain money management. Who’s got the best exchange-traded funds? Charles Schwab & Co. Vanguard is a close second in this competition. State Street, which got the ETF industry going with its SPDR S&P 500 fund, is in fifth place. BlackRock, whose iShares family is the biggest
John Rogers, chairman and chief executive officer of Ariel Investments LLC. Photographer: Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg Coming in July, the private equity world is in for a big change that could reshape the contours of the industry a decade after most blue chip firms began to join public stock markets. On Sunday, private equity pioneer KKR &
Diego Giudice/Bloomberg Argentina and its peso are in trouble, again. By officially replacing the peso with the U.S. dollar, Argentina’s peso nightmare would end. But, in a country in which fiscal fiddlers know many tricks, some fiscal rules must also be added to the prescription. Dollarization should impose a hard budget constraint on Argentina. Under