AP – The stock market ended its worst August since 2001 with meager gains Tuesday after minutes from the latest Federal Reserve meeting showed officials’ increasing concern about the economy. Related Reading:Trading Earnings: Know Your Collective Brands, Inc. (PSS) Options3 Easy Things You can do to Protect Your Portfolio When the Stock Market SucksSector Selector: [...]

Felix Salmon submits: Sam Mamudi has found a new way to slice mutual-fund data, and the results are very interesting: the flows aren’t just from domestic funds to international funds, as we can see from the monthly ICI data, but also from actively-managed mutual funds to index funds. Since the end of 2005, actively run [...]

Tom Lydon submits: It’s merger madness in the markets right now. And wouldn’t you know it? There’s an exchange traded fund to play it. Among the deals, would-be deals and not-deals-yet include: Complete Story » Related Reading:Calls Pop as Agriculture Fund Gains3 Easy Things You can do to Protect Your Portfolio When the Stock Market [...]

ETF Database submits: After slumping to start the day, equity markets stayed in positive territory only to fall back after the FOMC minutes were released in the final hour of trading. While stocks may have finished the day where they started, bonds and commodities experienced a more volatile day with yields on government debt once [...]

Hickey and Walters (Bespoke) submit: August wasn’t a very good month for risky asset classes. Of the 58 key ETFs highlighted below, fixed income, gold, silver, the yen, utilities, and Hong Kong were the only ones in the green during the month. The S&P 500 tracking SPY ETF declined 4.50% in August, the Midcap 400 [...]