The Sun's Financial Diary

Less than a month after Bear Stearns became the first firm ever to offer actively managed exchange-traded fund (ETF), PowerShares, an major player in the ETF arena, introduced its own active ETFs last Friday. The four new ETFs, including both equity and fixed income funds, are:

PowerShares Active AlphaQ Fund (PQY)
PowerShares Active Alpha Multi-Cap Fund (PQZ)
PowerShares [...]

Jonathan Clements, who writes the Getting Going column on The Wall Street Journal, recently celebrated his 1000th column. In his milestone piece, Mr. Clements reflected his journey of the past 1o years for writing the Getting Going and summarized what he has observed from the developments in the financial industry in the past decade.
According to [...]

Gold isn’t the only hot precious metal in town these days.
Spot silver surpassed the psychological $20 an ounce today to its highest level since October 17, 1980. Currently, silver is traded at $20.80/ounce (Kitco.com). So far this year, silver has gained more than 39%.
Then, there’s platinum which is also on fire since the beginning of [...]

The family of dividend-paying ETFs just got a little larger.
State Street Global Advisors on February 12th launched a new dividend-oriented exchange-traded fund, S&P International Dividend ETF (DWX). The new fund tracks the S&P International Dividend Opportunities Index, which was introduced a month ago on January 25, 2008. According to the fund prospectus, the benchmark consists [...]

Do you think there are just too many ETFs out there?
Apparently, there are. The latest evidence came from Claymore Securities Inc, one of the major issuers of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which in an announcement last week says it will close 11 of its 37 ETFs on February 20th and liquid assets in these funds on [...]

I didn’t.
I made a few bucks when Chinese stocks were the hottest on the street, but not lately. As a matter of fact, not just that I didn’t make any money from my investments in Chinese stocks, my brokerage account has been hit pretty hard since last November after some once high flying Chinese stocks [...]

One of the selling points of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is they are tax efficient because they funds themselves almost don’t generate any capital gain distribution, which can be taxed at a rate as high as 35%, comparing to their mutual fund counterparts. ETF capital gains are usually realized when investors sell the fund at profit.
This [...]

On December 17th, Vanguard launched three new Mega ETFs:

Vanguard Mega Cap 300 ETF (MGC): Track MSCI Large-Cap US 300 Index
Vanguard Mega Cap 300 Growth ETF (MGK): Track MSCI US Large-Cap Growth Index
Vanguard Mid-Cap Value ETF (VOE): Track MSCI US Large-Cap Value Index

All three funds have an expense ratio (ER) of 0.17%. According to MSCI, the [...]

Investors who look for incomes from diversified international equities have one more option to choose from.
Early last week, First Trust launched a new global dividend ETF, the Dow Jones Global Select Dividend Index Fund, joining other international dividend-paying ETFs. The fund started trading on November 27th under ticker symbol FGD. The underlying index of [...]

Chinese stocks have been hit pretty hard lately, no matter where the stocks are listed, US, Hong Kong, or mainland China. To get a sense of how bad things have been recently, take a look at these numbers:

Hang Seng Index (^HSI) is currently at 27,588, down more than 4,000 points from the peak of 31,638 [...]