Even though the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a 52 week high this week, it was a fairly flat week for averages across the board.  With an announcement by China that they had decided to leave interest rates unchanged, Monday the Dow Jones Industrial Average started on the upside gaining 18.24 points.  Caterpillar led the charge with a gain of 1.9% boding well for the global economy. The euro also had a big rise with worries subsiding about sovereign debt concerns that have plagued the European markets for weeks. The euro gained more than 1.2% against the dollar as word that European leaders would deal with the crisis spread. 

The Dow Jones Industrials added another 47.98 points or 0.4% on Tuesday to follow through with better than expected economic news and news that the Federal Reserve would continue adding cash to the markets. However, in a tale of two markets, the 10-year Treasury bond …

As Washington continues to try to iron out details on how to address the expiration of the Bush-era tax reductions, markets remain directionless.  S&P500 resistance also did not help from a technical perspective.

To begin the week, the markets gave up some of the prior weeks strong gains as the Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke commented that a furthering expansion of the banks asset purchasing program was possible.  This led to talks of a QE3 (or third program of quantitative easing.)  The S&P 500 fell to 1223.12 after three days to the upside Monday and Treasury prices rose pushing the benchmark 10-year note yield back under 3%  to close at 2.94%.  A report from Nomora that there was the possibility of a downgrade of US banks in the new year by some credit rating firms drove the financials lower offset somewhat by gains in mining company and telecom sector shares. 

By mid week, banks and Treasuries reversed …

We are experiencing more and more clients asking us about ETFs ( Exchange Traded funds).  This is a relatively new investment product that has been headlined in the financial news recently.  What is an ETF and how does it differ from a mutual fund?

There are two types of mutual funds - active and passive. Actively managed funds are the most common to investors.  These funds are managed by a portfolio manager or team of managers to invest in stocks and bonds or both to create either a sector portfolio (all banks, for instance) or a portfolio that follows a mandate of growth and income, for example, composed of stocks for growth and bonds for the income component. Passive mutual funds, on the  other hand, try to mirror a certain index - so they are called “index funds.” Index funds are the closest cousin of ETFs. While actively managed funds do not trade …

After strong rallies to the upside on positive news from Europe and an improving US economy, the slower than expected jobs growth reported Friday stopped the markets in its tracks. Continued worries about European contagion from Ireland to other countries in the European Union on Monday kept a lid on the Dow Jones Industrial Average which had been down as much as 160 points during the day but bounced back to only lose 39.51 points.   Unlike Europe, however, the Japanese market was able to post its largest gain in five months.  By November’s end on Tuesday, all the US market averages had suffered, driven primarily by sovereign debt worries as well as news from China surrounding inflation concerns.  Financials dragged down the DJIA on Tuesday with Bank of America retreating 3.2% and the average ended the month at 11006.02.

By Wednesday, the concerning news from China and Europe subsided and markets cheered with a 249.76 move up in the …