As soon as I saw the list of 799 financial stocks which were banned from shorting I was surprised that the financial ETFs, both long and short/inverse, were not of the SEC’s list. It struck me as very odd that the inverse instruments were still trading yesterday (they were halted for some time) and [...]

One of the Fast Money guys mentioned the UltraShort Oil & Gas ProShares ETF (DUG) on yesterday’s show. He questioned how that ETF, which is the double inverse of oil & gas could be up for the day while oil was also up. A quick look at what DUG actually is gives the [...]

Today I started reading Michael Panzner’s newly released (and well-timed given the recent sub-prime mortgage drama) book Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes. Reading the potential for those four catastrophes got me thinking that at some point I may want to place some bearish bets in my IRA. Inverse ETFs [...]

The Nasdaq continued to lead the major indices higher on Friday. It closed at a new 6-year high and above its upper Bollinger Band for the second day in a row.The S&P 500 and Dow made new closing highs and are just a buy program away from making new intraday highs. So the [...]

There was a whole lot of technical damage done on Thursday and Friday. Those days also provided some great trades if you were willing to go short. I think I get some kind of perverse pleasure out of shorting. I almost never look to buy stocks that are in extended slides but [...]

I saw this article in the January issue of Active Trader Magazine: “Trading a different S&P 500: The RSP vs. the SPY“. The RSP ETF contains the same 500 stocks that make up the S&P 500 but they are equally weighted as opposed to the S&P’s capitalization weighting. The interesting part is that [...]

Roger was nice enough to chime in on the question about judging the performance of country-specific ETFs yesterday. Today’s he’s expanded on his answer over on his own weblog. Bottom line (I think) is that you need to know what kind of companies make up the ETF so you know how to [...]

I was asked the following:

I was wondering how do you judge how well iShares are doing? I was watching EWL, Swiss Ishares and it broke out today. However, since it does not belong to any sector/industry and it is from a different country, thus how do we go about looking at it?

Random “ETF” Roger may [...]

Here’s a move I’m planning on making in my IRA beginning tomorrow. I bought EWZ, the Brazil iShares/ETF, back in October of 2004. It’s up just over 63% since my purchase. (Note that UBB, a Brazilian bank, is up about 87% from when I said it was in a good buying position [...]

I just heard about the potential for other commodity ETFs (besides gold) on Kudlow & Cramer last night. Here’s an article that says “currencies and precious metals ETFs likely.” It sounds like a great idea to me. Especially since I’m itching to read Jim Rogers’ new book “Hot Commodities : How Anyone [...]