Products

Big frauds and small starts

Big frauds often start small. Unforgivably, they often start with small omissions. Let’s take Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, whose managed accounts are now out $50 billion. It’s not clear whether that $50 billion was lost or if it was the supposed profits on $17 billion clients’ investments. It is clear that the numbers are big; […]

By Scot Blythe |December 18, 2008

3 min read

Dual dividends

Cheryl Crowe has a unique job. As SRI specialist with Assiniboine Credit Union in Winnipeg, Crowe researches the social investment world, provides internal training and develops sales tools for the company’s 49 advisors. “We’re positioning ourselves as experts in this area,” Crowe says. The strategy appears to be paying off. In 2007, Assiniboine added more […]

By Doug Watt |December 12, 2008

8 min read

Buyer beware

Recent years have introduced a host of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that let investors access asset classes in cheap and novel ways: iShares (Barclays) introduced funds of ETFs, Claymore launched a fundamental index fund, and Horizons BetaPro (Jovian) gained popularity with its leveraged bull and bear funds. Investors have poured billions into ETFs. At the end […]

By Al Kellett and Esko Mickels |December 1, 2008

4 min read

Prime hedge fund worries

The collapse of Lehman Brothers didn’t just take down the whole investment banking model of Wall Street; it also put the squeeze on a significant number of other investments, including principal-protected notes and hedge funds. Lehman’s PPNs, while notionally powered by various stock indexes, were actually senior unsecured obligations for a company now in bankruptcy. […]

By Scot Blythe |November 26, 2008

5 min read