An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a basket of securities that trades on an exchange like a stock. In the event you don’t know how the stock market works, shares of public companies trade at various prices based on demand.

Recently I had a client call in to sell his position in a fertilizer stock in which he made a 20% profit. His reason for selling was that the stock showed signs of weakness and he thought the Federal Reserve speech might spook the market into a downtrend.

reasons, I can’t point out individual stocks which I think could benefit from higher corn, wheat, soybean, and sugar prices–but do some research and you should find plenty of other people who have already done this research.

Would you consider it worthwhile for major brokerage firms to focus marketing dollars and valuable time on investors in their 20’s and 30’s? Perhaps more squarely phrased: Does this demographic have any money to invest?

WisdomTree Investments recently released earnings-based exchange-traded funds. This follows a pattern established by WisdomTree to market fundamentally-weighted ETFs which are unique and potentially valuable to a new generation of investors.

We’ve been talking in my office about getting a bit more defensive with our investment portfolios. The S&P 500 is up over 9% since January 1st and the year is half over. If you check my post from a few months back, fund manager Curtis Teberg offered a projection of the Dow Jones reaching 16,000 by year end.

I field a lot of questions about indexes. What’s the S&P 500? How is it different from the Dow Jones? What is the Russell 2000 and why does it regularly outperform its peers? I think this is important information for the average investor to know.

My last post asked the question “Are Corporate Retirement Plans a Bad Deal?” My response, as in most of my posts, is not simply yes or no. I prefer to break down the question such that plan sponsors and business owners can better reach their own conclusions.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing is about the benefits of index investing. This should be expected considering it was written by John Bogle. For those of you who don’t recognize the name, John Bogle started The Vanguard Group in 1974.