This past summer I wrote about the novel Macroshares trusts released this year that enable investors to speculate on the direction of housing prices. Earlier this week, MacroMarkets announced that instead of terminating in 2014, the trusts will terminate next week. Read the full article

For many people, December is the riskiest month in which to buy into a new mutual fund in a taxable account. This has nothing to do with the gyrations of the stock market, and everything to do with taxes. Read the full article

A recent scholarly paper reveals an interesting conclusion: quite a few hedge fund managers misrepresent the truth about past legal and regulatory problems, performance, or assets under management. Read the full article

Don Dion, writing in TheStreet.com, has included UMM and DMM on his list of the "10 Most Dangerous ETFs." Technically, they're not ETFs, but that's a minor quibble. Going beyond the criticisms I offered of MacroShares Major Metro Housing Up (UMM) and Major Metro Housing Down (DMM), Dion comments: Read the full article

Annuities have a bad reputation. They’re insurance contracts, which means they’re necessarily complicated. Often, they involve lots of hard-to-understand fees. And variable annuities, in particular, have earned a really bad reputation. Still, there is evidence that some form of annuity could be useful for many retirees. Read the full article

About 50 million people own 401(k)-type retirement plans, and the percentage of workers with defined-benefit (pension) plans has been dwindling for years. One problem with 401(k) plans is that many plans don’t disclose their fees openly. That would change if Congress moves forward with a bill currently awaiting action in the House of Representatives. Read the full article

A number of behavioral finance studies have shown that men tend to take greater levels of investment risk than women. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University have added to these observations with new evidence that high testosterone levels are associated with risky investment behavior. Read the full article

Announcements of new exchange-traded funds arrive in my e-mailbox almost daily, but today’s seemed ironically timed: a new inverse ETF tied to the performance of twenty-year Treasuries. Read the full article

The SEC issued a joint warning with FINRA today about the risks of leveraged and inverse ETFs for retail investors. Read the full article

The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA), of which I’m a member, is launching a free consumer education webinar series this week. Read the full article

As I noted about a month ago, FINRA has drawn attention to the fact that leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds are often not appropriate for retail investors. In response, some prominent broker/dealer firms have announced that they are backing away from the sale of such ETFs Read the full article

Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research recently released a brief that examines whether people nearing retirement should pay down their mortgages. Read the full article

As more attention is focused on to the risks of leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs), regulators are starting to investigate how they’re being sold to retail investors. Read the full article

Several weeks ago I found time to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness. This book, entertaining and eminently readable, is something between a memoir and a treatise on the pervasive human tendency to discern patterns in places where they don't actually exist. Among many examples, he shows how easy it is to mistake a lucky idiot for a skilled investment manager. Read the full article

Last May I attended a talk by Yale economist Robert Shiller in which he indicated that his company, MacroMarkets, was seeking SEC approval for a derivative product tied to home prices. Finally, this week the new “housing ETFs” are available. What are they about, and who should buy them? Read the full article

I noted last week that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has warned brokers that inverse and leveraged ETFs are inappropriate for many retail investors. Having discussed the workings and problems of inverse ETFs, I’d like to continue by taking a look at leveraged exchange-traded funds. Read the full article

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) recently notified brokers who sell complex Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) that “inverse and leveraged ETFs typically are not suitable for retail investors who plan to hold them for more than one trading session.” The warning is long overdue, as leveraged ETFs were first introduced in 2006 after three years of SEC review. Read the full article

Yesterday I noted that the Treasury Department has posted the Obama administration's proposals for financial regulatory reform. In the midst of all the information that's there, I missed an important detail. The administration's white paper, Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation, calls for the fiduciary standard to be applied to broker-dealers. This would be a landmark change from current practice. Read the full article

At the height of the credit market crisis last year, there were loud calls for dramatic changes in the regulation of financial institutions. Now that the sturm und drang has ceased, the reforms that will be realized will be much tamer. Read the full article

A couple of items at the Calculated Risk blog caught my eye today; both suggest that mortgage rates might well be headed higher. Read the full article

Last Thursday, I attended an excellent seminar held by State Street Global Advisors and Morningstar. Although the meeting focused on building portfolios with exchange traded funds (ETF's), the highlight of the afternoon was a presentation on the current state of the global markets. Read the full article

Brokers are not innately bad people, but the systems under which they’re required to function can make it tough for them to work in the best interests of their clients. Read the full article

At last I’ve gotten to the question I promised to address last month: how do different kinds of investments perform in inflationary environments versus deflationary ones, and is there any way to protect yourself against both risks? Read the full article

There’s a continuing debate over the question of whether active mutual fund management (funds that buy in and out of the market, looking for stocks that managers believe will outperform the market) is capable of consistently beating passive management (buy stock indexes). Standard and Poor’s Index Services recently weighed in with its latest assessment on this question. Read the full article

A couple of weeks ago I began a primer on ISOs and some of the tax implications of exercising them. I’d like to discuss some cases in which an ISO grant is employed in a manner that is “disqualifying.” Read the full article

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