European and US equity markets are very volatile this year.While the S&P 500 had a solid double digit growth last year,the index is having a rocky ride this year. The year-to-date price returns of some of the major developed and emerging benchmark indices are listed below: S&P 500 Index: 0.9% UK’s FTSE 100: -1.8% France’s CAC 40: 3.2% Germany’s DAX …

Continue reading ‘Performance of Exchange-listed Foreign Bank Stocks Year-to-Date’ »

The Bank of Ireland  is the top performer year-to-date among the foreign bank stocks trading on the organized exchanges. The Governor and Company of the Bank of Ireland (IRE) is up by 29.15% YTD. Comparatively British banks such as Barclays(BCS), HSBC (HBC), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Llyods Bank(LYG) are all down between 4% and …

Continue reading ‘The Best Performing Exchange-Listed Foreign Bank YTD: Bank of Ireland’ »

The S&P 500 index is down 0.40% year-to-date in price terms. Brazil’s Bovespa and Mexico’s IPC Index are down 12.7% and 11.2% YTD respectively. Commodity-based Brazilian economy is suffering from slowdown in China. Chinese demand for many types of commodities such as iron, copper, etc. have fallen drastically in recent months leading to depressed prices …

Continue reading ‘Comparing the 5-Year Performance of S&P 500, Brazil and Mexico using ETFs’ »

Every year Callan Associates publishes their famous The Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns. Recently they updated the table with data for 2013. The Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns for 2013 is shown below: Click to enlarge Source: Callan Associates As always this chart makes it clear that diversification among asset classes is important. For …

Continue reading ‘Review: The Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns 1994-2013’ »

Canada and Australia are two of the commodity-based developed economies. Canada depends heavily on the U.S., its top trading partner while the Australian economy is more tied to Asia especially resource-hungry China.   Hence the economic growth of these two countries depend on the U.S. and China respectively. In terms of equity returns, how did …

Continue reading ‘Performance Comparison: Canada vs. Australia ETF’ »