Saturday, February 22, 2025
For the moment, short-term craziness in the market has evaporated. Volatility is returning to more normal levels—well, normal for the last year anyhow. Most of 2020 as well as January 2021 were anything but ordinary. Nevertheless, we can’t ignore the future…and the future certainly includes potential interest rate movement. After the pandemic hit, the Federal […]
For income investors, the last 11 months have been, to paraphrase Dickens, “the best of times, the worst of times.” The February-March 2020 market crash was especially brutal on the high-yield investment sectors. Without a lot of information, I had to analyze my Dividend Hunter recommendations and decide which were best to sell and which […]
Virgin Galactic (SPCE) has been a popular stock this past year, but it got a huge boost this past week. SPCE jumped 20% on news that ARK Invest will be creating a new space ETF. ARK ETFs are quite heavily traded, so being added to any of the ETFs is generally a boon for the […]
There have been periods in the past during which investing in bonds was interesting. Some of the best books about Wall Street were written about bond desks in the ‘80s. These days though, the fixed income world is plagued by ultra-low rates. Much of the investment world has turned its attention to equities and other […]
One of the more intriguing current trends in U.S. investing is the growing number of strategic ETFs that have become available to investors. Index investors have typically used ETFs like SPY to capture the action of the broader market. However strategic ETFs represent or emulate an entire trading strategy, rather than just tracking an index […]
Casual investors will be aware of what happens in the stock market, but may not be as well informed about the current state of interest rates. Retirement plan experts recommend allocating a large portion of 401(k) accounts to bonds, and those building for retirement using their company 401(k) plans may not be aware of how […]
2020 has been a wild ride for investors in energy infrastructure stocks. A range of factors, including energy demand destruction due to COVID-19, a meltdown of the high-yield investment sectors, and a perception that new, renewable energy technologies, will quickly replace oil and gas usage. Energy infrastructure, sometimes called energy midstream, are the services that […]
In March and April, the pandemic-triggered stock market crash hit the high-yield investment sectors, especially hard. Exchange-traded funds and notes (ETFs, ETNs) lost up to 90% of their value in a very short time. UBS to Redeem Two Leveraged Mortgage ETNs After 95% Plunge “Leveraged” is the word to note. Before the COVID crisis, there […]
The stock market crash at the start of the so-called “coronacrisis,” was especially devastating to share prices in high yield sectors. I attribute the extra steep declines to what I have labeled a “liquidity event,” in which leveraged funds using the high yield investments were forced to sell, sell, sell, to avoid becoming leveraged into […]
The S&P 500, and its ETF analogue SPY, is roughly breakeven for the year, which is crazy if you think about it. We had a full market crash in March due to the coronavirus pandemic. For the most part, the concerns that arose in March haven’t come close to being resolved; yet the stock market […]
