To keep interest rates at rock-bottom lows and boost the economy, the Federal Reserve is buying $40 billion a month in mortgage-backed securities, and it'll keep buying them for as long as it takes to get the economy back on track. Here's how that plan should affect your personal economy.
The investment world's love affair with ETFs continued in 2010, as more than 1,000 funds managed assets of $940 billion. Here's a review of the best and the worst performers, and a few reminders about how to use these investment vehicles safely.
Whether investors can outwit the broader market over the long run is a perennial, hotly debated, topic. But computerized trading and virtual baskets of stocks are making the discerning of specific companies' fortunes matter less and less.
The securities industry is always coming up with the "latest and greatest" way to make a quick buck. But almost all of such vehicles are structured to benefit brokers and money managers. Investors wind up getting relegated to their usual status as victims with no redress.
Retail investors who think they're missing out on the big money because they don't have a million bucks to get into a hedge fund should consider themselves lucky. Hedge funds had their best year in a decade in 2009 -- and yet they couldn't even beat the broader market.
You can deal with future dollar declines by gaining exposure to foreign currencies -- either by investing in the currencies themselves, or by buying stocks in companies whose earnings aren't denominated in dollars.
