With the launch of Pimco's actively managed short-maturity fixed-income fund, is the U.S. finally ready for money market ETFs? Lara Crigger & Dave Nadig dissect the new fund, and what it means for investors.

Direct from Schwab's New York ETF launch event, Matt Hougan and Dave Nadig discuss the "free-to-trade" ETF concept.

Matt Hougan and Dave Nadig debate the pros and cons of exchange-traded notes, examining their tax treatment, issuer credit risk and the dearth of new products.

This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• John Hussman (Hussman Funds): Rumors of the death of the credit crisis are greatly exaggerated, October 26, 2009. In recent months, I’ve strongly rejected the notion that the credit crisis has been conveniently placed behind us and that the U.S. is now in a typical post-war economic recovery (and can be approached as such from an investment perspective). This view continues to strike me as dangerous and even naïve.

• Dave Nadig (IndexUniverse.com): Nouriel Roubini - big crash coming, October 23, 2009. Roubini will be the keynote speaker at IndexUniverse’s upcoming “Inside Commodities” conference on November 4 at the New York Stock Exchange. IndexUniverse sat down with Dr. Roubini ahead of the conference to take his temperature

...

Leading academics and index experts examine how investors should handle the falling dollar.

 

The Death Of The Dollar?, the November/December 2009 issue of the Journal Of Indexes, focuses on currency and related strategies, with contributions from Invesco PowerShares' Bruce Bond, the International Securities Exchange's Steve Meizinger and Marc Chandler and Jeffrey McCarthy of Brown Brothers Harriman, not to mention a currency primer by Index Publications' own Dave Nadig, Matt Hougan and Lara Crigger.

Other articles in the publication include a look at how EMH weathered the financial crisis of 2008 by David Blitzer, the first installment of a three-part series on improving fund evaluation techniques by Gary Gastineau and a study from David Blanchett on how to figure out the "passive" portion of an actively managed portfolio. And let's not forget the ETF crossword puzzle on the back page!

You can view the entire issue

...

Is currency truly an asset class? On the back of their recent Journal of Indexes article, Dave Nadig and Lara Crigger explore the numbers.

Target date ETF families are wildly different and seemingly unpredictable. So why do both Matt Hougan and Dave Nadig use them?

Barclays is saying the U.S. is out of a recession and headed for veritable boom times. IndexUniverse's Matt Hougan and Dave Nadig aren't so sure.

With the launch of a new bullion-based silver ETF, Matt Hougan and Dave Nadig pose the question: Is SIVR a better mousetrap, or just another shiny bauble?

 

In case you missed it, juiced-up inverse bond ETFs are here. Could this really turn out to be a more workable solution for long-term investors to hedge their portfolios?

As Matt recently noted in his excellent review of the ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury ETF (NYSE Arca: TBT) and several similar rivals, fixed income seems to provide much less tracking error during periods of market fluctuations than its leveraged and inverse equities rivals. (See article here.)

That begs the question, could bonds turn out to be a safer, or more mild-mannered and logical, way for investors to add some hedging strategies to long-term portfolios?

“In the vast majority of circumstances measured over a day, a week or even a month, these types of funds will likely deliver close to a simple multiple of the long-term index return,” notes Hougan in the article.

But he adds: “As you extend out over a month, however,

...