Over the weekend, there was an interesting MarketWatch.com article, "In come more bond ETFs: Vanguard enters wide-open market as Barclays throws out the 'junk,'" about the battle for bond ETF supremacy between Barclays (BGI) and Vanguard, with BGI landing the first few punches. Two items in particular caught my interest:- BGI's launch of the first high yield ETF, the iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond Fund (ticker HYG); and
- the very low 0.11% expense rates for the Vanguard bond ETFs
Specific to VIX, volatility and risk, I can see future applications involving the use of a high yield ETF with a government long bond ETF like TLT to look at ratio charts (unfortunately, StockCharts.com does not yet have HYG in their database,) price differential charts, etc. This type of analysis might turn out to be a good complement to the Markit Credit Default Swap data.
Looking more at the “…and More” side of the ledger, here are a handful of ETF-related links that I get a lot of value from:
- ETF Trends – an excellent site that is dedicated to general ETF news
- Yahoo ETF Center – where you can sort and filter all the nearly 500 ETFs that Yahoo has in their ETF database
- a February Kirk Report ETF link fest – the top 20 ETF links as selected by his readers
- iShares splash page
- ...and for those that may be interested, my favorite ETF blogger is Roger Nusbaum (a.k.a. Random Roger)
Finally, while the bond ETF field is already getting crowded, I thought I might point out a half dozen ETFs that have consistently high volume and consequently are as appropriate for trading as they are for longer term investing:
I just discovered that the day after I posted this, Will McClatchy had an interesting article about high yield ETFs in the context of the sub-prime fallout:
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