Exchange-traded funds have been all the rage in recent years – they are easy to buy, easy to sell, and often have lower expense ratios than index mutual funds. But the Casey Research team dug deep into the complex world of ETFs and found that in many cases, their names can be utterly deceptive.
Here are a few excerpts of our revealing special report, The Top Ten Misleading ETFs.
Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners (GDXJ) – This ETF sure has a funny definition of a junior mining company. In my opinion, a junior miner is a small, speculative company just getting off the ground. Our publication, Casey International Speculator, specializes in this particular kind of company. If I had to put a number on the market cap, I'd say that junior miners fall under the $500 million mark. If you really want to push the definition to its limits, maybe a market-cap ceiling of $1 billion could still qualify for junior status.
Regardless of the exact line of demarcation, most of us can agree that "junior" means "small." Furthermore, most investors can agree that market caps over a billion dollars are anything but small. A billion isn't a major, but it's clearly in mid-tier territory. That said, the Junior Gold Miners ETF's top 10 holdings are all over a billion dollar or more. The top holding, with 5.23% of assets, even has a market cap of $2.4 billion – that's not exactly a junior, to say the least, and neither are the other companies on the list: Continue reading "ETFs: Do You Really Know What You’re Buying?"
You have probably seen the posts below about MarketClub's "Perfect Portfolio", but if you haven't, now is a great time to catch up on them to get ready for this week's 
Out of the four markets that we track in the Perfect Portfolio, we’ve made money in three of them. To put it another way, the Perfect Portfolio was 75% correct. The biggest winner was our GLD position that tracks gold which gained 12.77% for the month. The next winner was SPY, which tracks the S&P 500 index. It went up 6.06%. Next to that was our position in the FXE which tracks the euro. This market produced a positive gain of 1.99% from November. The only ETF that disappointed us was the crude oil market which we used the symbol USO to track. This produced a negative return of .45%.
