How to Trade Growth vs. Value with ETFs

Ever been to an investment conference or watched CNBC? If so, you’ve heard people talk about “growth stocks” and “value stocks.”

What do they mean by this? How does knowing the difference make money for you? Today I’ll tell you what these terms mean and give you some ways to take advantage of them with exchange traded funds (ETFs).

Two Kinds of Stocks —
Two Kinds of Investors

If you want to buy stocks, you can take your pick of thousands. Each has its own character and history. The most successful investors have a “style” and stick with it. This isn’t a matter…

Five Emerging Markets ETFs for 2009

If you’re an emerging-markets investor, and you happened to peruse the study that the Institute for International Finance released this week, you must’ve experienced alarm – if not panic. The IIF expects the inflow of private funds into these markets to plunge to only $165 billion this year – an amount that’s just 18% of the $929 billion that flowed into these very same markets in 2007.

For investors, the message is clear: We’d better concentrate on those emerging markets whose inhabitants have hefty piggybanks of their own.

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Here are TIPs to Protect Yourself from Future Inflation

This article is another in my series of articles about common mistakes that the average individual investor makes in their overall portfolio allocation. For these articles, I drew from the 20 years of experience I had at Charles Schwab in dealing with clients face-to-face and helping them meet their financial goals.

In previous articles, I wrote about two areas which were dramatically under-represented in most clients portfolios – commodities and international securities. There is a third area which I found to also be under-represented and that is fixed income investments. Many clients had little or no exposure to fixed income investments.

The most…

Market Vectors Environmental Services ETF: Adding Recession “Insurance”

A friend of mine, along with his family, owns and operates one of the largest landfills in my area. He smiles and says, "It’s about as a recession-proof business as you can find. Here in the United States, people and businesses generate 750,000 tons of garbage every day. The trucks never stop coming."

Many years ago, before recycling became popular, the company started a recycling operation as a natural extension of the landfill business. It’s doing very well. When any given recyclable commodity goes up, the company’s a seller. The rest of the time, it just stores the copper, steel, aluminum and…

Inverse ETFs Continue To Thrive In A Grim Market

In a week in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has surrendered more than 10% of its value, inverse ETFs have continued to thrive.

A screen of the top 20 performing ETFs tracked by MSN Money for the 4-week period ending October 7th, will return a list that includes 19 inverse ETFs. The only non-inverse ETF is a fund that tracks the performance of the Swiss Franc relative to the U.S. dollar. This fund has averaged a meager trading volume of 1,600 shares, essentially rendering it insignificant.

The top performer over the past 4 weeks has been the UltraShort Basic Materials ProShares…