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Our experts frequently write blog posts about the findings of the research we are conducting.

Displaying 71-80 out of 158 results for "Equity Indexed Annuities".

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - June 7th, 2013

(Jun 2013)

Final Judgments Entered Against Former Nicor Senior Officers Kathleen Halloran and George Behrens
June 5, 2013, (Litigation Release No. 22715)
Final judgments were entered against Kathleen Halloran and George Behrens, former CFO and former Treasurer of Nicor, Inc. respectively, for allegedly overstating "Nicor's financial performance...by, among other things, making or authorizing false and misleading statements about Nicor's performance in multiple filings with the Commission." The SEC...

Dodging Hedge Fund Requirements: The Case of Mariner Access

(Jun 2013)

Nowadays, there are several ways that retail investors can purchase risky investments which would typically be considered unsuitable. For example, many exchange-traded funds (ETFs) use derivatives to offer investors access to risky asset classes (such as CDOs) or complex options positions (such as covered calls). Since ETFs can be bought and sold like any other listed stock, essentially any investor can now take covered call positions regardless of her understanding of options. There is even...

Risks of Mortgage REITs

(May 2013)

Instead of investing in real estate property directly like equity real estate investment trusts (REITs) do, mortgage REITs borrow in the repo markets and invest in mortgage backed securities (MBS) -- mostly residential MBS issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. The current environment of low interest rates has kept the borrowing costs low for mortgage REITs, facilitating their outstanding growth. The figure shows the market capitalization for all listed mortgage REITs and the...

Investors Returning to Capital-at-Risk Products

(May 2013)

Yakob Peterseil of Risk.net recently noted that "[b]anks are boosting issuance of leveraged notes linked to US equity indexes and notes that pay out when yield curves steepen." According to the article, reverse convertibles and buffered notes are seeing a resurgence as investors begin to be more optimistic about stock market growth. In addition, principal-protected structures like structured certificates of deposit and principal-protected notesare falling out of favor as attractive terms are...

Options Strategies Embedded in Exchanged Traded Products

(May 2013)

In theory, exchange traded products (ETPs) can be linked to almost any underlying asset, including derivatives. While many ETPs are linked to portfolios of bonds or stocks, some are linked to portfolios of futures contracts, which we have discussed at length before. Bill Luby at VIX and More has written a couple posts on ETPs that are linked to portfolios of options, which are gaining some traction with investors. As usual, we greatly enjoyed Bill's posts and thought we'd explain some of the...

Update on Apple-Linked Structured Products

(May 2013)

A few months ago, SLCG issued a working paper that studied the decline in value of Apple-linked structured products. Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal also wrote a piece about these findings, most notably that Apple's stock price decline had serious repercussions in the structured product market. Apple's stock price has continued to fall and we recently updated the paper to show how this decline is still affecting investors in structured products.*

Since reaching $700 in September of...

Equal Weighting versus Market Capitalization Weighting

(Apr 2013)

We often hear about different stock market indexes in the same breath: on the evening news, you might hear that 'the Dow was up half a percent, the S&P gained three quarters of a percent, the NASDAQ was down a tenth of one percent'. While it may seem that these indexes tend to move together on most days, there are important differences between equity indexes. The one we hear about the most is that they are composed of different stocks: the Dow Jones Industrial Average tracks only 30...

529 College Savings Plans Underperform Similar Mutual Funds -- Morningstar

(Apr 2013)

On Monday, Morningstar Fund Research issued their 2013 529 College-Savings Plans Industry Survey, which reviews the performance of the 529 industry in 2012. Their study finds that "college savers are continuing to invest in 529 college-saving plans at an impressive clip, even though their performance has lagged that of similar funds in recent years."

529 Plans are typically run by states and are used by investors to save for future education expenses such as college tuition on a...

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - April 19th, 2013

(Apr 2013)

SEC Files Subpoena Enforcement Action Against Andrew Farmer and Iridium Capital, Ltd. for Failure To Produce Documents in Market Manipulation Investigation
April 18, 2013, (Litigation Release No. 22680)
Last week, the SEC filed a subpoena enforcement action against Andrew Farmer and Iridium Capital, Ltd. "According to the filing, the SEC is investigating possible market manipulation in connection with transactions in the securities of Chimera Energy Corporation." Subpoenas were issued last...

New Study Comparing Indexed and Actively Managed Funds

(Apr 2013)

NerdWallet, a San Francisco based personal investing site, has performed a historical study of the returns on almost 8,000 mutual funds and ETFs over a ten year period and found that passive indexed funds tend to outperform actively managed funds on average. In fact, they found that only 24% of actively managed funds outperformed the average return of the indexed funds. These results are consistent with the annual SPIVA Scorecard produced by S&P Dow Jones Indices, which found in both 2012...

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