ETF Model Solutions®

S&P 500 Has Not Corrected 10% in More Than 3 1/2 Years

The S&P 500 has gone more than 3½ years without experiencing a 10% correction, according to Bespoke Investment Group. It is now the second longest stretch without a 10% correction since 1929. The longest is seven years (10/90-10/97). On average, the S&P 500 experiences a 10% correction about every 18 months, according to S&P Capital […]

ETF.com Award Winners Announced

ETF.com announced its 2014 award winners at its annual banquet held in New York City on Thursday.  Endowment IndexTM calculated by Nasdaq OMX® was a finalist for Index of the Year.  The Index of the Year award went to the Bloomberg U.S. Dollar Spot Index. Other category winners included: ETF of the Year: Wisdom Tree […]

Institutional Investors Double “Smart Beta’ Exposure

Institutional investment clients of Towers Watson doubled their allocation to smart beta strategies over the past two years to $40 billion.  The firm sees the continued strong demand for smart beta strategies broadening beyond equities, particularly in the bond market. Towers Watson’s clients include pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations and insurance companies.    

ETF Investor Psychology

To be successful at anything, requires discipline.  In athletics, you must train your body to make certain movements at certain times so that during competition, those movements become second nature and you can perform them without thinking.  To be healthy, one must be disciplined to eat right and get proper exercise.  And to be successful, […]

Investors in this iShares Frontier ETF face unusually high capital gains obligation

One of the reasons ETFs have been adopted so widely is that ETFs are typically very tax-efficient investments, especially when compared to mutual funds, because their structure typically allows them to avoid shareholder distributions.  The operative word in the opening sentence is typically.  This year, one particular ETF, the iShares MSCI Frontier Markets 100 ETF […]

Press Release: Endowment IndexTM Historical Data Now Available Through Morningstar, Interactive Data and Bloomberg

APPLETON, Wis., Nov. 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ Historical index data for the Endowment IndexTM — calculated by Nasdaq OMX® — is now available through major index and investment databases, including Bloomberg, Morningstar, and Interactive Data.  In addition, the 30,000+ advisors on the Envestnet platform can now select the Endowment IndexTM to benchmark client portfolios. Endowment IndexTM […]

How To Invest Like The Ivy League Endowments with ETFs

Seeking Alpha published an article by Prateek Mehrotra outlining how ETFs can help investors build institutional quality portfolios diversified into liquid alternative investments designed to improve long-term risk adjusted returns. The article summary The country’s largest endowments aim to preserve capital while producing income and appreciation with less correlation to the stock market regardless of […]

United States Commodity ETF files paperwork to be registered under Investment Company Act of 1940

United States Commodity Funds, the Oakland, California-based firm that did so much to popularize futures-based exchange-traded funds focused on commodities, has filed regulatory paperwork describing a broad commodity fund that qualifies for the same tax treatment as a plain-vanilla equity or fixed-income fund.   The USCF Dynamic Commodity Index Fund is being registered under the Investment Company […]

Use of Liquid Alts Growing in Self-Directed IRAs

A recent article at WealthManagement.com discussed that interest in self-directed IRAs is growing.  A few reasons for this are that more people have begun to accumulate sizeable assets in their retirement plans. and are looking to diversify their portfolios beyond stocks, bonds and mutual funds.  As such, there tends to be a greater appetite for alternative assets […]