The Sun’s Financial Diary

The world of water investment is getting crowded.
Yesterday, PowerShares launched five new international equity ETFs, and one of them is PowerShares Global Water Portfolio (PIO), one month after two offerings from Claymore Securities and First Trust Advisors. The new water ETF tracks the Palisades Global Water Index (PIIWI). According to AMEX,
The Palisades Global Water Index [...]

Because of my connection with China, I always keep an eye on what’s happening 6000 miles away from my house. These days, the biggest story in China seems to be that its once relentless climbing stock markets finally hit the break. Since closed at record high on May 29th, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index [...]

Not long ago, investors who are looking for investment opportunities in blue gold, water that is, could find themselves facing very limited choices other than individual stocks as there are only a couple of water related indexes and the only practical choice seems to be the only water related ETF, PowerShares Water Resources ETF (PHO), [...]

I like the idea of letting money work for me on its own. One way to do that is buying equities that generate dividends. Last year, about 10% of our gains are from dividends, capital gains, and interests. Since long-term qualified dividends are taxed at a much lower rate (at most 15%) than short-term capital [...]

The fourth segment of the Model Portfolios Built with ETFs series, is making an appearance at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity as a guest article. In this part, I discussed how to build an all-ETF portfolio based on a model in the book, The Intelligent Asset Allocator by William Bernstein, that consists of, among other asset [...]

This morning I sold my position in PowerShares Dynamic Semiconductors (PSI) and used the proceeds to buy more PHO, PowerShares’ water ETF. The reason I am interested in investing in water has been explained before, but why PSI?
There are two reasons: First, I already have an investment in semiconductor and that’s TSM, a stock that [...]

This is the third segment of the Model Portfolios Built with ETFs series. In the first two parts, I discussed two model portfolios, the Couch Potato Portfolio and the Bogel Head Portfolio, and considered possible choices to build these portfolios with ETFs instead of transitional mutual funds.
In this part, I continue the discussion with [...]

This is the second part of the Model Portfolio Built with ETFs series, which convert Jonathan’s Model Portfolios into all-ETF portfolios. In this part (the first part can be found here), I looked at the four example portfolios in The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing [Amazon.com affiliate link] and examined ways to reconstruct these portfolios [...]

Last month, Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog ran a series on model portfolios which covered some (so far six) popular portfolios based on various investment philosophies. When these model portfolios were originally developed (some are more than thirty years old), the main investment vehicles were mutual funds, where were apparently the only choices at that time. [...]

When I was researching at Morningstar.com for small-cap investment (both mutual funds and ETFs) yesterday, I found their ETF selection tool quite convenient.

Simply place the cursor over the investment style you are interested in and click, then a list of ETFs in that category will appear with information such as style, returns, and trading volume.

However [...]