Tag: ETF Investing

Invest Alongside The Pros With These ETFs

Posted on by Matt Thalman

Matt Thalman - INO.com Contributor - Exchange Traded Funds ETFs


As the popularity of Exchange Traded Funds has grown with investors, so have the options investors have when it comes to the type and style of ETF they want to own. Not only can an ETF investor buy specific asset class ETFs, but they can buy ETFs designed by specific investors.

Just like how different asset classes have different risks, different investors have different beliefs about what makes a good stock. Each investor, professional or retail, has different metrics they look at, have different investment timeframes, have different investment goals, and just approach the market and investing in a different manner. These differences often make one investor successful while another fail. Following alongside well known, successful investors can help teach you what works and perhaps what you have been missing in the past.

So even if you decide not to buy an ETF that is based on your favorite investor, at least take a look at it, you may learn something. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few ETFs I have found that track the pro’s, and see what we can learn. Continue reading "Invest Alongside The Pros With These ETFs" →

Socially Responsible Investing Isn't Cut and Dry

Posted on by Matt Thalman

Matt Thalman - INO.com Contributor - ETFs - Socially Responsible Investing


When it comes to investing in socially responsible companies, a lot depends on what values and principles you hold in high regard when you are trying to find the right fund for you.

Socially responsible or ethical investing encompasses a wide range of sub-sectors which you need to sift through before just jumping into an “ethically responsible” fund. For example, there are environmentally focused funds, funds that concentrate their efforts on finding companies who have sound corporate governance policies, others that look at the impact a business has on society as a whole, and this is just to name a few.

One fund that may be “ethical” and may not be would be the Inspire Global Hope Large-Cap ETF (BLES). The fund tries to find companies which the fund manager believes to line-up with “biblical values” and even has a proprietary scoring system which measures a company’s level of participation in abortion, gambling, alcohol, pornography, “the LGBT lifestyle,” just to name some of the big topics. But while some people may find some “biblical-values” ethical, others may not find them to be, one, in particular, being the “LGBT lifestyle” metric. Continue reading "Socially Responsible Investing Isn't Cut and Dry" →

Facebook's Decline Has Hurt These ETFs

Posted on by Matt Thalman

Matt Thalman - INO.com Contributor - ETFs - Facebook


When a major company such as Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) is caught in a scandal, the declining share price doesn’t just hurt investors who knowingly bought shares of the company. It also hurts all those unsuspecting shareholders who may own part of the company through different Exchange Traded Funds.

On March 16th, shares of Facebook were trading at $185.09. The news broke that 50 million customers had their data taken from Facebook by a company called Cambridge Analytica and used to persuade American’s to vote for President Donald Trump. By March 27th Facebook shares had bottomed out at $152, a nearly 18% decline from the day before the story broke. As of this writing, shares of the social media giant have recovered a little, and now they trade at $160 per share, still a 13.5% decline.

Anyone that knowingly owned shares of Facebook before this story breaking has decided to either ride this rough patch out or jumped ship. But, some investors own shares of Facebook and have likely taken a beating because of the situation and may not even have known what was causing their portfolios to fall. Continue reading "Facebook's Decline Has Hurt These ETFs" →

Why Rebalancing Your Portfolio Is Important

Posted on by Matt Thalman

Matt Thalman - INO.com Contributor - ETFs - Rebalancing


Despite only being three months into 2018, investors have been on quite a wild ride. The market started off the year as it ended 2017, on a tear higher, then the brief crash in early February, which led to a nice calm recovery during the remainder of the month just to run into what I’m calling “Whipsaw March” with the market jumping higher and lower by more than 1% nearly every other day. Not only have the major indexes been extremely volatile, but some of 2017’s biggest winners, big technology and especially the FANG stocks have seen their prices fall more than 10% in 2018.

Big pops that reverse fortune and the big drops that follow always cause investors to wonder what they could have done to protect themselves from the decline without completely abandoning their position.

The most straightforward and most effective answer to that situation is to rebalance your portfolio. Rebalancing is when you bring the percentage of your holdings back in line with each other.

For example, if you have a portfolio made up of 10 stocks and each represents roughly 10% of your portfolio, you would have a ‘balanced portfolio.’ Now if one of your stocks outperformed the others and ended up representing say 25% of your portfolio, instead of just 10%, then you would rebalance by selling some of your shares in that company until it represented 10% of your total portfolio. Continue reading "Why Rebalancing Your Portfolio Is Important" →

The Ultimate Buzz Word ETF

Posted on by Matt Thalman

Matt Thalman - INO.com Contributor - ETFs - Buzz Word ETF


On January 30th the team at Exchange Traded Concepts, an Exchange Traded Fund issuer, released the "Ultimate Buzz Word" ETF, the Innovation Shares NextGen Protocol ETF (KOIN). Alright, I’ll admit, the name may not be loaded with buzz words. But the fund’s concept is loaded with recently popular buzz words such as “Blockchain” and “Artificial Intelligence.”

The KOIN ETF is a fund that tracks an index that uses artificial intelligence to pick global stocks which have current or future interests in blockchain technology. On the surface, this ETF just feels like someone trying to take advantage of today’s hot investing buzz words.

Even after Bitcoin rose from under $1,000 to above $19,000 in less than a year, most retail investors didn’t fully understand what blockchain technology was. But they knew that while a lot of big-name investors and economist were skeptical of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’, the one thing most people would agree on was that blockchain technology was great. Continue reading "The Ultimate Buzz Word ETF" →