In the Rear View Mirror: For the first four days of the week, U.S. stocks looked pretty good. Then along came Friday. When the dust settled and the market closed on Friday, the good news was U.S. stocks rose for a second consecutive week. The bad news is Europe … [read more]

Emerging Markets Carnage! That’s at least one way to describe the landscape investors faced when it came to Chinese stocks in 2011. And that’s just the large-caps. Broadly speaking, the small-caps were a mess unto themselves, attracting controversy at nearly every turn. Muckraking financial journalists and eager short-sellers … [read more]

In the Rear View Mirror: It was a decent start to the year for U.S. stocks. Or was it? The S&P 500 closed higher by 1.6% in the first trading week of 2012 while the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 1.2%. By comparison, the Nasdaq looked quite impressive with a 2.7% gain … [read more]

Imagine for a moment that 2011 was a normal year for investors and by “normal” we mean that Europe wasn’t pressuring global financial markets on an almost daily basis and emerging markets generated solid alpha as they did in 2010. While that obviously wasn’t the case this year … [read more]

To be sure, 2011 was not a good year for Chinese small-caps. The Guggenheim China Small-Cap ETF (NYSE: HAO), which is home to 200 Chinese small-caps and is the largest … [read more]

In the Rear View Mirror: U.S. equities finished the last trading week of what was a volatile 2011 slightly lower for the week, including the final trading day of the year. With the dust having settled on 2011, the Dow Jones finished the year higher by 5.5% while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 closed the … [read more]

These days, it’s not inaccurate to say that plenty of investors are aware of the options available to them in terms of agribusiness investment opportunities. That’s a good thing because the fact of the matter is demand for food is expected to outpace supply in the years ahead. However, the stories of … [read more]

In the Rear View Mirror: Maybe it was all the Santa Claus rally the bulls could muster, but the final trading week before the Christmas holiday was a strong one as all three major U.S. indexes closed higher for the week with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq … [read more]

Investors not living under a rock by now know that 2011 has been trying, to say the least, regarding investing in emerging markets. A theme that worked so well for the bulk of 2010 was broken in 2011 for a variety of reasons. The European sovereign debt crisis is an easy, but … [read more]