Invest Skeptically

RRSP “season” will be arriving soon in Canada and savvy financial advisers will use this opportunity to sell their clients on pre-authorized regular contributions towards their retirement savings plans. Dollar cost averaging, they’ll say, is the strategy to go with.
While it makes sense from a psychological point of view to [...]

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The FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) Market Data site has great summary data on U.S. stock and bond markets. The site includes equity index levels, investment grade and high yield bond index levels, market diaries, U.S. yield curve, news, and economic indicator calendar. It also has links to the TRACE (Trade Reporting and [...]

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Overview–
Primus Guaranty Ltd. (PRS) sells CDS (credit default swap) protection on single name corporates, CDO tranches, and ABS. As selling protection is the same as going long credit risk, the business’ success relies on management’s ability to select names that pay a good spread for their level of risk and to trade credit exposures [...]

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Markit provides authoritative quotes for standardized structured finance and credit indices used in the credit derivatives markets. As these represent the cost of buying/selling credit default swap (CDS) protection against a basket of credits they can be a useful data point in evaluating the level of fear in the marketplace. As 2007 has [...]

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On their website, FocusShares states that their mission includes “captur[ing] investors imagination”. I think their product offering has succeeded:

FocusShares ISE-CCM Homeland Security Index Fund (MYP)
FocusShares ISE SINdex Fund (PUF)
FocusShares ISE-Revere Wal-Mart Supplier Index Fund (WSI)
FocusShares ISE Homebuilders Index Fund (SAW)

24/7 Wall St thinks they’ve gone too far in becoming so [...]

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