It’s been an age old question. You’re facing retirement and are trying to decide whether it is wise to pay off your home mortgage or not. Maybe you have a bias because you witnessed your parents’ mortgage burning ceremony and are wondering if that still makes sense nowadays. As a general rule, I believe that living a retired life without …
Special No Load Fund/ETF Tracker Update For 9/18/2007
Wall Street got its version of an early Christmas present by finally getting a long wished for rate cut by the Fed. Not only that, the cut was wide and deep, encompassing the Fed Funds rate and the Discount rate at a hoped for ½ point rather than the acceptable ¼ point. As the chart above shows, the reaction was …
Income Investing: First Muni Bond ETF Debuts
On September 10, Barclays Global Investors debuted the first ETF to track the U.S. municipal bond market, which will provide investors a different way to invest in municipal issues as reported by Bloomberg. My preference for investors with after-tax money wishing to generate income has always been the use of closed end muni funds, the benefits which have been detailed …
Sunday Musings: Getting The Upper Hand
The problems and tremendous cash needs of Countrywide (as a stockholder you might prefer the name “Countryslide”) made me reflect on my recent dealings with them and how a company that size could get themselves in such a predicament. The $2 billion cash infusion by Bank of America seems to be gone and it appears that Countrywide is on the …
From The ETF Archives: Beware Of Low Volume ETFs
Since ETFs trade like stocks, large Bid-Ask trading spreads can eat into your potential profits. As a general rule, this does not appear to be a problem with ETFs that are heavily traded. To demonstrate, at the time of this writing, I checked out the spreads for 2 ETFs that I don’t have any positions in at the moment. Let’s …
No Load Fund/ETF Tracker updated through 9/13/2007
My latest No Load Fund/ETF Tracker has been posted at:http://www.successful-investment.com/newsletter-archive.phpThe bulls had the upper hand and the major indexes ended up in positive territory. Our Trend Tracking Index (TTI) for domestic funds/ETFs moved higher to +4.03% above its long-term trend line (red) as the chart below shows: The international index also remained +0.84% above its own trend line, keeping us …