You won’t be surprised when I say the U.S. markets are lousy right now. Can you find niches that are performing well? Sure — I often highlight these for you when I see them. But most U.S. stocks and sectors are going sideways at best. Moreover, I don’t see the situation changing in the near future.
This doesn’t mean you’re stuck in a low-yielding cash account, though. The world is full of opportunity for those who know where to look. Places like South America and Southeast Asia are still growing nicely, despite weakness in the U.S.

It seems that for now retail forex is going to be the playground of leveraged traders.  The CFTC has proposed rules that continue to allow for retail traders to leverage their funds by 50-1.  Retail traders are part of the rising volumes in forex.  A report from the BIS shows the global forex volumes continue to surge.  The forex market is evolving rapidly, but the big players remain in place.  In today’s screencast we wonder if there are any pure plays on forex volume.

In what turned out to be the worst month of August in over a decade, bear ETF’s, funds that are built in order to profit from market downturns were at the top of the ranks. These funds and especially the leveraged short ones dominated the charts with Direxion and Proshares sharing the lead.

A thought occurred to me the other day as I was looking at the filings page on the IndexUniverse weekly ETF Watch. It might be interesting to create a portfolio from some of the funds that are in registration. To be clear these funds do no exist (yet) and many of the filings are so old that it is quite clear to me that, assuming they are still active filings, some of the funds will never list but I'd very probably be a buyer of the WisdomTree Chilean Peso ETF if it ever listed. For purposes of this post I won't speculate on the likelihood that any filing will become a fund.

With bond yields and stock markets in the world’s major developed economies petering away, more people are asking: Where can we find investment returns?
Wall Street’s answer: Emerging markets.
The long-term growth prospects in emerging markets are certainly attractive. But with the propensity for another round of global economic crisis and the intertwining of economies, the risk associated with those investments is quite high.
The economic outlook for major economies has deteriorated rapidly.