All Things ETF

The markets did well yesterday, up 379 points. Impressive breadth across the board. The Wall Street Journal has a great data center for Etfs . The ETF Gainers, Decliners and Most Actives data column is pretty good, its updated throughout the day and you do not need a subscription to get the information. Yesterday's big market day had ETF funds lit up with huge market moves especially in leveraged ETFs. ProShares funds had a huge day yesterday on the leveraged side. ProShares , if you are unfamiliar with this fund group, is one of the largest short and leveraged ETF family of funds in the world. Of course, many of their short funds were down but the leveraged funds (finally) did better. The Proshares Ultra Financials ( UYG ), 52 week % change - 92.61% and ProShares Ultra S&P 500 ( SSO ), 52 week % change -73.21% finally got a break and is up 4.23% and 2.03% respectively today. Now, I am not advocating that now is the time to buy into these two funds. I still think a wait and...

Recap: The Treasury announced the launch of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility ( TALF ) on Tuesday. Unemployment hits 8.1% with many economist suggesting more pain to come. Dow industrials closes up 32.5 points at 6626. The Nasdaq closes down 6 points at 1293 .

The markets, which I believed had tanked 'already' , looks to go even further in the toilet. Do you sell, buy, hold or liquidate everything and go straight to cash? Do you continue to listen to your broker and hold onto your positions? About two years ago, when the DOW was still above 8,000, brokers were still giving that same advice- "Don't panic and sell out your positions", as the markets began its 1 year and 8 months slide so far. This idiotic, stupid, blanket advice that I have been hearing brokers give their clients is one of the reasons that I could not be a run-of-the-mill stockbroker anymore. You are given all the support and tools to buy and nothing to make sell decisions and " selling short " is even worse. Well, I have a DOW number: 6500. I am predicting that around 6500 is a good number for the DOW. Based on what I have read and researched over the last two years, and my personal opinion on the value of bad assets on many financial institu...

I have not covered exchange traded fund Spdrs by State Street Capital and Powershares by Invesco Management as of yet. I am very behind in my coverage of these funds, however I will step up the pace in the upcoming weeks.

I have been tracking exchange-traded fund indexes of oil and gas, banking, health and pharma, real estate and commodities but none of these indexes are budging from their lows. Maybe, I am looking at this in the wrong way. A few points here, a few points there- nothing major; The only investors that are possibly making money are the short sellers. If you are good at short selling then this is the market for you. Lets take a look at a good short fund.

Sorry readers, I am experiencing some serious writers block. I have been trying to write a post, but dismal economic performance across all industry sectors have caused me to pause.

New exchange-traded fund info to be posted this week.