Oil services giant Schlumberger annouced Q2 earnings on Friday that exceeded analyst expectations and saw the stock price jump nearly 4% on the day. Second quarter revenue climbed 20 percent to $6.75 billion, led by gains in Latin America, Africa and Europe.
The recent introduction of funds focused on the Middle East, North Africa and other developing economies has created a new category of Frontier Markets ETFs. The investment case is that the Frontier Market economies are where theEmerging Market economies were 20 years ago.
When evaluating ETFs for your portfolio, one of things you should check is if the fund is holding stocks that you already have exposure to through other ETFs. The pros call holding the same security across multiple funds overlap.
The recent launch of Vanguard’s Total World Stock Index ETF (VT) brings choice and low-cost diversification to investors. VT joins the iShares MSCI ACWI Index Fund (ACWI) in the category of offering investors an opportunity to gain exposure to stocks worldwide with a single investment.
ETF investors can establish positions on the price of oil as we first discussed in our March ETF Commentary post Oil ETFs.
After hitting a low back in March, technology ETFs have bounced back along with the market. In mid-April, tech ETFs pulled ahead of the broader market which has been weighed down by concerns about the economic outlook and uncertainty around the financial sector.
Interested in investing in telecommunications with ETFs? Since hitting 52 week lows back in March, telecom companies and telecom ETFs are making a come back as you can see in the chart below.
A few weeks back, we presented the investment case for Brazil in our post The Case for a Brazil ETF. Despite signs of slowing economies in other parts of the world, Brazil continues to deliver good news.
Money market mutual fund assets climbed again last week as investors continue to park cash on the sidelines.
Arden Dale covers preferred stocks in today’s WSJ personal finance section, noting that the combination of high yields and low taxes makes them a nice complement to municipal bonds. Investors can use ETFs as a low cost, diversified way to take advantage of the yields that preferred stocks offer which currently hover around 7%. We first introduced preferred stock ETFs in an earlier post.