powershares

High-dividend exchange traded funds struggled against the broader market last year. Just look at the iShares Select Dividend ETF (NASDAQ: DVY), one of the largest such funds. DVY trailed the S&P 500 by almost 700 basis points in 2017. Several of the S&P 500's highest-yielding sectors...

Another exchange traded fund using the fund of funds of strategy debuted Thursday with the launch of the Innovator IBD ETF Leaders ETF (NYSE: LDRS). The new ETF is a partnership between Innovator Capital Management, LLC and Investor's Business Daily. Innovator Capital Management was started by...

Share buybacks among S&P 500 member firms are declining. In the second quarter, S&P 500 companies repurchased $120.1 billion of their own shares, an almost 10-percent decline from the first quarter. Second-quarter repurchase activity was almost 6 percent lower on a year-over-year basis and...

The rotation into financial services stocks and exchange traded funds is real. In November, the Financial Select Sector SPDR (NYSE: XLF), the largest financial services ETF, added $1.5 billion in new assets.  Last week, XLF added nearly $530 million in new assets, a total exceeded by just five...

Among factor-based exchange traded funds, low volatility products, including the PowerShares S&P 500 Low Volatility Portfolio (NYSE: SPLV), are undeniably popular. There are, however, drawbacks to low volatility ETFs. Those include the potential to miss out on some upside during bull markets...

Venezuelan sovereign bonds have been among the world's most volatile. On Wednesday, the South American country unveiled a debt restructuring deal with Russia and, separately, earned words of encouragement from another major creditor: China. Earlier this week, S&P Global Ratings said...

When it comes to fee battles in the world of exchange-traded funds, such tussles usually take place among issuers. Several major brokerage firms have made it cheaper for investors to trade ETFs by offering commission-free programs, an arena that's proving to be a new frontier of cost tussles....

Invesco Ltd. (NYSE: IVZ)'s PowerShares unit, the fourth-largest U.S. exchange-traded funds issuer, recently ventured into the low-cost, plain vanilla ETF space in a big way, launching five inexpensive, pure beta ETFs in a single day last month. PowerShares followed that up with the recent launch of...

Invesco Ltd.'s (NYSE: IVZ) PowerShares unit is the fourth-largest U.S. issuer of exchange-traded funds. PowerShares had over $130.1 billion in ETF assets under management. While the cap-weighted PowerShares QQQ (NASDAQ: QQQ), the Nasdaq-100 tracking ETF, is the largest PowerShares fund, the...

Share buybacks, along with dividends, are considered shareholder rewards, but there is additional insight to be gained from companies' repurchase efforts. Several exchange-traded funds, in some form or fashion, focus on companies that are prodigious repurchasers of their own shares, including...

Although higher beta momentum strategies and stocks have been performing well this year, some low volatility exchange-traded funds are at least keeping pace with the S&P 500. For example, the  iShares Edge MSCI Min Vol USA ETF (NYSE: USMV) and the PowerShares S&P 500 Low Volatility...

Vexing currency market observers, the PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Bullish Fund (NYSE: UUP) is down 8.4 percent year to date. That is an arguably stunning decline when considering the Federal Reserve has boosted interest rates twice this year. UUP, the exchange-traded fund proxy for the U.S....

Technology is the best performing sector in the S&P 500 this year, but health care is not far behind. Last year, health care notched its first negative performance on an annual basis since 2008, but the sector is rebounding in style in 2017. Health care's 2017 resurgence has been buoyed in...

While the S&P 500 has been solid this year, truly impressive equity market performances can be found in developed markets outside the U.S. That sentiment applies to ex-U.S. smaller stocks. U.S. small-caps have confounded investors for much of this year while their international counterparts are...

The strength being displayed by emerging markets equities and the relevant exchange-traded funds is getting harder to ignore. For example, dozens of emerging markets ETFs hit 52-week highs on Wednesday with one of those being an seasoned veteran among alternatively-weighted funds in this asset...