New ProShares ETFs aim to provide 200% leverage to four key international markets.

 

If you think international markets are on the verge of a new leg up in the ongoing broad global rally, a few more tools via exchange-traded funds are now available to provide more leverage.

ProShares launched on Wednesday four ETFs taking 200% positions in four popular foreign indexes. Two are broad in geographic reach and each adds to existing ProShares ETFs that take inverse positions with the same benchmarks.

The new ProShares are the:

ProShares Ultra MSCI EAFE (NYSE Arca: EFO) ProShares Ultra MSCI Emerging Markets (NYSE Arca: EET) ProShares Ultra FTSE/Xinhua China 25 (NYSE Arca: XPP) ProShares Ultra MSCI Japan (NYSE Arca: EZJ)

These ETFs each seek to capture 2 times the daily performance of their underlying benchmarks. That's something to consider since rival Direxion recently moved to introduce a series of leveraged ETFs that track monthly index performances. (See related article here.)

In theory, being able to track a longer return period should

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After passing much of 2008 standing thankfully on the sidelines, we believe that with current valuations, opportunities have returned for putting capital back into long-term positions in emerging markets.

In fact, we believe that emerging markets will recover faster and outperform developed markets over the long term.

In our December 2007 edition of Without Borders we wrote:

“So much money has been sloshing around the globe in search of an “above average” return that even risky assets have been bid up tremendously. At this stage, however, with new holes in the financial dike showing themselves almost weekly – more holes, we suspect, than officialdom has fingers – the money flows are building toward a reversal. This will hammer the emerging markets the hardest because, historically, in times of crisis, capital packs up its bags and goes home. When that happens, shares of good companies get sold at

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Source: Casey Research  02/16/2009
After passing much of 2008 standing thankfully on the sidelines, we believe that with current valuations, opportunities have returned for putting capital back into long-term positions in emerging markets. In fact, we believe that emerging markets will recover faster and outperform developed markets over the long term.

In our December 2007 edition of Without Borders we wrote:

“So much money has been sloshing around the globe in search of an “above average” return that even risky assets have been bid up tremendously. At this stage, however, with new holes in the financial dike showing themselves almost weekly – more holes, we suspect, than officialdom has fingers – the money flows are building toward a reversal. This will hammer the emerging markets the hardest because, historically, in times of crisis, capital packs up its bags and goes home. When that happens, shares of good companies get sold at the …

If you need more proof that the US lost the Cold War to Russia and China you need look no further than Venezuela, says emerging markets expert Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profit. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, inked two significant energy deals with China and Russia that will divert American oil to our former Cold War adversaries.

What further proof do we need that we lost the Cold War than to have China and Russia take over critical oil supplies right in our own backyard?

Americans like to believe that the 40-odd-year Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. That’s when Ronald Regan was president and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union collapsed. (That led Dick Cheney to also tout Reagan’s famous fiscal theory that deficits don’t matter.)

With the …

The headlines are dramatic. Short selling banned for 799 financial institutions. $50bn injected into money markets. Plans for a massive bailout fund to clear the system of bad debt and stabilize the housing market.

The Unholy trinity – the Federal Reserve, SEC and Treasury – has pulled out all the stops this time. But while US stocks soar, Justice Litle says the government’s bailouts are a death blow for the dollar.

This makes real, tangible assets highly attractive. Justice says the most profitable investments going forward will be energy, infrastructure, hard assets and non-US growth plays.

More from Taipan Daily:

In the short run, it’s not clear how things will play out – the markets are an absolute circus right now. (As if you needed someone to tell you that.) In the long run, though, we are seeing the reality of the Austrian Endgame unfold, here and now, right before our eyes.

I’ve been pounding …

The news that Washington is fast becoming the world’s biggest slumlord through the buyout of distressed mortgages helped send international markets skyward.

The biggest gains were in Russian stocks. And this could be the situation for quite some time, says emerging markets expert Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profits.

The irony, of course, is that Washington and Moscow are now marching in lockstep with each other when it comes to their stance on market intervention. After a series of unprecedented bailouts, the US has effectively renounced the principle that markets are self-regulating.

This from Irwin…

Russia’s RTSI Index (RUS:RTS.RS) jumped 20.17%. That’s huge, especially in comparison China’s SSE Composite Index (Shanghai: 000001.SS), which gained 9.46% and the Hang Seng Index (HKSE:^HSI), which closed up yesterday 9.61%.

Meanwhile, the Dow closed yesterday with a gain of 3.9%.

That Moscow and Washington have both used massive bailouts to …

The ugly truth can sometimes yield beautiful profits, says Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profits. But the truth exposed by the US government’s recent round of Wall Street bailouts is that the US actually lost the Cold War in terms of its free-market philosophy. Investors should adjust their portfolios accordingly…

For a while now I’ve been writing that if you can integrate a historic shift into your investment strategy you may come out ahead. The shift is this: that America actually did lose the Cold War.

This became apparent to me about a year ago when we saw the economies of our old Cold War enemies, Russia and China, continue to thrive as our own free market economy literally started to melt down.

Now with Washington bailing out AIG, it seems that our Cold War defeat is undeniable. The very same foreign-policy …

Things are progressing here at Emerginvest quite well, but this week has been mostly development on behind-the-scenes code, so there isn’t too much too report. Aside from that, we know that you, our users, enjoy our site for one reason: a shared passion for global financial trends and emerging markets. In light of that, I wanted to start writing a series posts that would be more pertinent for you. Topics I have in mind are: highlighting global information portals, commenting on insightful articles, and our perspective on major financial topics like portfolio diversification. For the first of these articles, I wanted to expound upon the last post and aggregate a list of high-quality emerging market and global economic blogs. Most of these authors are financial advisers and economists and I have yet to find a place which combines this wealth of information. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so ...

By Jason Simpkins Associate Editor Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. (MER) has raised its annual infrastructure-spending estimate for emerging markets by 80%, as developing countries try to keep pace with fast-growing economies and large cash reserves, BusinessWeek reported. Investment in infrastructure, which the firm sees as the long-term solution to inflation, will rise from $1.25 trillion to $2.25 trillion annually over the next three years. And China, the Middle East, and Russia will account for 70% of infrastructure spending. The report from Merrill Lynch pointed out that Xstrata PLC (OTC: XSRAY) recently predicted emerging markets would spend $22 trillion on infrastructure in the next 10 years. “That estimate is among the highest we’ve seen,” the report noted, “with an implied run rate of $6.6 trillion over the next three years.” Estimated Infrastructure Spending For the Next Three Year...

Knowledge of the country weights in the emerging and developed markets indices can be helpful in specifying allocations within the equity portion of a portfolio.

For those clients who wish to allocate primarily on a country basis (as opposed to a sector basis, for example), our general philosophy is to begin the design process from the starting point of world market capitalization, then deviate from there as appropriate per client.

More specifically, we recommend placing at least 50% of equity assets in broad index funds in proportion to world market capitalization. Then, depending on your degree of aggressiveness and your confidence in your assessment of markets, placing up to 50% of equity assets in regional or country funds with anywhere from minor to massive overweights or underweights.

In order to make a conscious overweight or underweight decision, you need to know the neutral weights.

The major weight categories, US (proxy VTI), non-US developed …