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on rates, jobs, stocks and the economy

Why did stocks go down when the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that almost 300,000 new jobs were created in May and that another 30,000 or so were being added to the March and April tally? Because stocks don’t go up on good economic news, they go up on bad economic news. Why? Because people…

Competition to Launch the Most Complicated ETF Heats Up

I’m not opposed to some level of sophistication in the ETF market and I’m cool with innovation. But have we gotten really far away from the original appeal of these products? A few years ago, the blogosphere mocked the launches of such nonsensical products as the “global aquaculture ETF” – literally an index of publicly…

Stats from the 2015 Fortune 500 List

My friends at Fortune published the 61st annual edition of the Fortune 500 list today, with the actual issue hitting newsstands on Monday.  From the press release, some interesting stats about America’s corporate giants: The Fortune 500 companies earned a combined total revenue of $12.5 trillion in 2014, up 2.6% from last year and an…

The Riskalyze Report: Advisors buy Emerging Markets again

At the request of so many investment advisors, my friends at Riskalyze share the big trends in the assets going into and coming out of advisor portfolios every week. The underlying data is aggregated from hundreds of thousands of client accounts across the $44 billion and counting that advisors manage on the Riskalyze platform*. I…

M&A Deal and Dollar Volume Explodes

Jeff Kleintop puts together the latest on M&A – in both deal volume and deal dollar size – for his latest piece at Charles Schwab. He notes: Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity of publicly traded companies around the world has hit an eight-year high, according to data from Bloomberg. Both the number of announced global…