IUSB News and Press, iShares Core Total USD Bond Market ETF From 08/14/19

Last year at this time, the US Fed was still on a path of increasing short-term interest rates and reducing its swollen balance sheet. The period of tightening began in December 2015 when the Fed Funds rate lifted off from zero percent. The Fed then rolled out a rote program to reduce the lega...

Markets typically reflect political and economic events around the world. The trade dispute between the United States and China has captured the market's attention over the past year. The economic slowdown has caused Chinese GDP to grow by the lowest rate in recorded history at 6.2% in Q2. At ...

It is somewhat hard to believe that it is once again the first Friday of the month. This means that it is time for yet another jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In this case, the report was rather disappointing as job creation numbers greatly missed the expectations of analyst...

Over the past year or so, I have been arguing that investors need to watch the bond market because the bond market will be capturing and incorporating into prices the major forces impacting the world. Here we are at the end of May 2019 and the percent yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note ...

Firth Ratings has issued a warning - a general one, not about any specific fund or provider of them - concerning open-ended bond funds. The essential and basic idea of such funds leaves them potentially vulnerable to the same problems banking is. That of a bank run where withdrawals outpace th...

To liquefy the bond market, the financial risk management profession thinks to introduce the innovations to bond trading that led to the stock market liquidity/volume explosion of the early 21st Century. Various financial firms have introduced four principal innovations: Index funds Futu...

For the first week in four, investors were overall net redeemers of fund assets (including those of conventional funds and ETFs), withdrawing $24.1 billion for Lipper's fund-flows week ended March 20, 2019. However, the headline numbers are slightly misleading. Fund investors were net purchase...

When it comes to portfolio construction, many experts will tell you that you need a number of different products dedicated to a multitude of asset classes. You should start with a broad large-cap fund such as the SPDR S&P 500 ETF ( SPY ). Around that, you may want to add a mid-cap or small...

The ETF Focus Ultra Low Cost Core Portfolio was the first of our model portfolios and aims to achieve a very simple goal - offer a broadly diversified portfolio that keeps costs as low as possible. It's a balanced portfolio that maintains a 75/25 mix of stocks and bonds but really can be tweak...