The last week was characterized by investors increasingly taking the view that the worst of the credit crisis was over. They seemed to be shrugging off further substantiation of the dreadful state of the US housing situation, as they digested the latest round of quarterly earnings reports. The latter ranged from plunging profits from Bank of America (ANC) to a dreadful report from Ambac (ABC) to guidance from Microsoft (MSFT) that failed to live up to investors’ expectations.

Stock markets see-sawed as investors assimilated the various economic and earnings reports, with the S&P 500 Index eventually eking out a positive return of 0.5% for the week, thereby consolidating the previous week’s gains (+4.3%).

Evidence of a more relaxed undertone among equity investors was confirmed

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Country equity funds differ in a number of ways. They vary in sector weights, currency exposures, political risks, stock market liquidity risks, interest rate and inflation risks, and other factors.

To illustrate the point, let’s look at the different sector weights in six passive country index ETFs from Barclays for the Americas.

ILF (Latin America)
EWZ (Brazil)
ECH (Chile)
EWW (Mexico)
EWC (Canada)
ISI (USA)

You can see from the chart that the sector weights vary considerably from country-to-country.

Canada and Brazil with a heavy energy weight will tend to do well when oil is high, but less well or poorly when oil declines. However, Canada also has a large financial company exposure to the current global credit crisis. That has dulled the advantage of being heavy in energy compared to Brazil which has less financial company exposure.

Mexico is heavy in telecommunications which did and may create strength when major new …

VMware (NYSE:VMW) had a nice 13% run over the last 5 days which made me remember EMC Corporation (Public, NYSE:EMC). EMC still owns 86% of VMware and how could you forget that IPO last year? Since that time, billions have been lost in market share for both companies, but now we are finally at a low and could these stocks finally start to move upward again?

In 2007 VMware got up to $125 a share and EMC got back up to $25, but last winter the tide turned and both fell hard:

EMC shareholders are holding out for their Q1 Earnings call later this month on April 23rd.

EMC began in 1979 and today stands an American Fortune 500 and S&P 500 manufacturer of software and systems for information management and storage.

EMC produces a range of enterprise storage products, including …