All Things ETF

In the latest unemployment numbers, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 244,000 in April and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.0 percent. Although the economy created 244,000 thousand jobs, the unemployment rate still increased. However, the recent numbers still gave the markets a nice boost on Friday, May 6, 2011. However the day before, Thursday April 5th, there was this massive stampede of investors out of commodities, sending many benchmark indices and the respective funds and stocks that are pegged to these indexes down to levels not seen since 2008. This brings me to the issue in this article- determining your risk tolerance. Accurately determining your risk tolerance is one of the most important steps that you can make in managing and building your investment portfolio over time. Determining your risk tolerance helps you avoid the nervousness and feelings of dread that you may feel when the overall market takes a nose dive, no...

Welcome to another week. I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend. Well, it looks like its going to be another turbulent week in the markets with oil prices headed up. Any higher and prices will possible affect the U.S. economy as consumers will have less money to spend due to higher gasoline prices. Still, profits aren’t being reflected in the price of oil and gas stocks as they should. Based on expected profits, most oil and gas producers stock prices should be higher, even though many oil and gas drillers and oil services companies stocks have done well over the last six months. I think if you want to see pretty fantastic returns, you should wait until earnings are reported in the third and fourth quarter of this year. To profit and make money in the oil and gas markets, we are recommending this moderately aggressive portfolio that uses a combination of oil and gas , and alternative energy exchange traded funds . Of course there are other positions that are included but are on...

By Rick Walter When Moody's cut Ireland's debt to just above 'junk' last week, making money in the European markets  just got a little bit more riskier. The markets still have to deal with the debt problems of Portugal, Spain and Greece. Monetary policy by the the Euro Union and the U.S. is still a ways off from normalizing. However, the reason that you would want to invest in European markets is because these markets gives you the potential to increase your portfolio’s total return, they act as a hedge against dollar assets and also gives your portfolio diversification which reduces overall portfolio risks due to the low correlation of these markets to U.S. markets. Long-term evidence also suggests that international markets outperform U.S. markets in most periods, therefore investing in Europe may and can help you save more for retirement. But can an investor make money in Europe today? Should you take a chance and invest in Europe while monetary policy rules the...

Read our updated commentary on Investment and Financing ideas that can help you save more for retirement and help you finance your business so that you can save more for retirement. Biotech is heating up, so I have added a few Biotech ETFs to the watch list. By UCS Investment Co.

By Rick Walter Traders Comments : This ETF fund contains all 30 Dow component stocks. We had purchased this ETF early last year in 2010, but because of its raggedy and inconsistent trading patterns, dumped the shares for another ETF fund of similar scope....

By UCS Investment Co. The new ETF posting on the AT-ETF Exchange is the PowerShares KBW Property & Casualty Insurance Portfolio (Fund) . The Symbol is KBWP . This is a relatively new fund which opened in December of last year. The Fund is up about 1% so far this year. We are not expecting a huge run up in price in the short-term on this fund but we are looking forward to steady gains in the share price of the fund as the economy improves.

Dear Readers, Please tune in to our daily podcast or radiocast episodes. Our episodes are filled with market updates and exciting recommendations on investments that we believe can make you money! You can find our podcasting and radio posts here at this link . Thank you, UCS Investment Co.