User 151033

Wednesday Outlook: Commodities, Emerging Markets

DITTO!

Bond Market Needs Revolutionary Change For Investors' Sake

The simple fact is that the bond market isn't centralized as the stock market is. There isn't a bond "exchange." They do not trade like either stocks or mutual funds and probably never will, though some such as debentures and NYSE bonds do. 95% of the bond market is institutional, 5% retail investors. But DYI can nevertheless peruse various bonds, their prices, and yields on several different websites, investinginbonds.com being one of them, and of course they can buy bonds with several online discount brokers. The info's out there; it just doesn't have the hype stocks and funds do.

A bond is far superior to any fixed income or bond etf or fund, in my judgment, because it has a maturity date and you know exactly what your total return will be; bond etfs and funds are in effect perpetuals without either a maturity or call date. Bonds are the risk averse assets that, in the long run, will outperform stocks and allow you to sleep at night, an argument that most retail investors, bombarded as they are everyday by the buzz from the stock and fund industry and their spin doctors, have difficulty believing. Boring old bonds! Not very exciting. Indeed that's their virtue. BTW, global or foreign bonds are very risky for countless reasons. Good luck with that.

Mea Culpa (ETN Version)

From day 1 the issue has been the absence of details about the debt instruments that these ETNs hold aside from the fact that in most if not all cases it is a package of debts of the issuers? How do we know the debt even exists? You can get a credit rating on a given issuer, of course, but given the sub prime mess in the U.S. and the ABCP mess in Canada, who can have that much faith in any rating agency these days.

Tuesday Outlook: Commodities, Emerging Markets

Dave,

It's not that government intervention can't be useful; it's that it must be the right kind. One could argue, given the crisis, for the FED to do absolutely nothing would be considered irresponsible -- certainly politically and perhaps economically. So the question, in my mind, isn't should they be doing anything at all, but rather are they doing the right thing? The aggregate infusion of cash from several central banks in coordination with the FED today should tell the tale in a month or so.

Commodity ETFs Overbought; Gold Least So

This last commentator has it right. Ironically, perhaps, in terms of technical overbought indicators, only spot gold has really been somewhat overbought.

Commodity Analysts Believe the Party's Over

But aren't these analysts basing their estimates on the usual commodities cyclical structure, a structure that has been profoundly disrupted by a set of historically unusual global economic circumstances based an a supply-demand ratio, a ratio reflected in a steady trend upwards for commodities? Gold estimates for these analysts, for example, are based I believe on a $850./ounce estimate, whereas all indicators, technical and fundamental, suggest a movement in 2008 to at the very least $1000.