Today we are featuring top-performing “Precious Metals" equity mutual funds, which primarily invest in equity securities companies that are involved in mining of gold and other precious metals. Investors can find such funds by checking out the entire list of the Zacks #1 Rank Precious Metals Equity Funds.

3 Precious Picks

Van Eck International Investors Gold A (INIVX) seeks long-term capital appreciation by investing in common stocks of gold mining companies. The fund was incepted in January 1956.

The fund normally invests at least 80% of total assets in the gold mining industry, with at least 25% of assets invested in gold mining stocks. The fund may invest up to 100% of its assets, or, for temporary defensive purposes, less than 25% of its assets in gold stocks. Randgold Resources Limited, Goldcorp Incorporated and Agnico-Eagle Mines Limited are among its major holdings.

The fund declares and pays dividends in March, June, September and December.

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Fidelity says it's not interested in expanding more into ETFs.

Fidelity Investments already has its toe into the exchange-traded funds market. Apparently, that's about as far as it's willing to go, at least for now.

The president of the Boston-based mutual funds giant, known for its star manager system, let it be known last week that he was seeking a replacement. In the course of giving interviews to papers and news wires, the executive -- Rodger Lawson -- also made it clear that the firm was never interested in ETF's dominant player, Barclays Global Investors, when it was put on the market.

That led Sue Asci of InvestmentNews to ask Fidelity representative directly if the company wasn't going to pursue expanding its ETF presence. “We have no current plans to expand proprietary ETFs,” Fidelity spokesman Vin Loporchio told the magazine. (You can read the full story here.)

In

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Law Firms Threatening Action Against Leveraged ETF Providers

At least two law firms say they're talking to clients who use leveraged exchange-traded funds about potential lawsuits against the funds' providers.

The list is large and includes ETFs sponsored by ProShares, PowerShares, Direxion and ETF Securities, which recently entered the U.S. (see story here.)

How do we know this? The law firms, of course, put out a press release. You can read it here.

 

Two Deutsche Bank Funds Hit By CTFC Ruling

A pair of PowerShares-DB commodity ETFs will be curtailed in how much they can buy in soybeans, wheat and corn due to a decision by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

You can read this Bloomberg News report for more details. Also, check Matt Hougan's blog here.

 

SSgA's Hoguet: Sovereign Wealth Funds To Buy SDRs

Special drawing rights, or SDRs, are what the International Monetary Fund uses internally as currency markers to traverse

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While industry experts are still pondering if the recent flurry of successful initial public offerings indicates a broader recovery, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts on Monday agreed to sell shares of its private-equity companies through Fidelity Investments.

Under terms of the agreement, Fidelity's retail customers will get access to the IPO shares. Until now, such offerings mostly went to institutions and wealthy investors. Again with private equity firms looking to expand their reach, KKR will not only get a distribution channel but also exclusive access to the Boston-based mutual fund giant's clients.

As financial markets have been murky over the last few years, KKR has not taken any of its portfolio companies public since the IPO of Sealy (ZZ) in 2006. While it still considers buying out the Amsterdam-listed KKR Private Equity Investors LP in order to go public, that IPO has also been on hold for at

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Today we are featuring "financial equity" mutual funds, which invest at least 50% of their assets in financial services and related companies.

Investors can find such funds by checking out the Zacks #1 Rank Financial Equity Funds list.2 Solid Picks

FBR Small Cap Financial (FBRSX) invests at least 80% of its assets in securities of small-cap companies with market capitalization of less than $3 billion. The fund focuses on companies that invest in real estate, usually through mortgages or other consumer-related loans.

Since its inception in December 1996, this Zacks #1 Rank fund has been managed by David Ellison of FBR Fund Advisers Inc. Previously, Ellison was a portfolio manager with Fidelity Investments. The fund distributes dividends and capital gains annually. As of January 2009, its portfolio turnover was 147%.

Investors have to make minimum

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Bernanke Sees Late-09 Turnaround; Canadian Dollar Hits Six-Month High; Kraft Beats 1Q Estimates; South Africa Unemployment Hits 23.5%; Service Sector Gains Ground; AIG’s First Quarter Loss Expected to Shrink; Some Traders Oppose Up-Tick Rule; Chile’s Peso Rallies to 7-Month High Against Dollar

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the U.S. economy will begin to “turn up later this year,” contingent upon the financial sector’s continued improvement, Reuters reported. Speaking to a congressional committee, Bernanke said the housing market may be bottoming out and pointed to improving consumer spending. The Canadian dollar hit its highest point since November. “The market is now willing to embrace risk and move clean of the safety associated with the U.S. dollar,” Stewart ...

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/P8WHqJYwRlGVgVPubgkG08KFBX8/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/P8WHqJYwRlGVgVPubgkG08KFBX8/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pSeveral of you have recently ask where the stock market is heading and when will it rebound. You probably know however that I am not an investment adviser. There are several investment firms however that are worth a close look if you are seeking investment counsel:br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"1. Fidelity Investments/spanbr /a href="http://personal.fidelity.com/products/funds/mutual_funds_overview.shtml.cvsr"Here/a is an overview of their four and five star funds.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"2. T Rowe Price/spanbr /a href="http://individual.troweprice.com/public/Retail/Mutual-Funds/Historical-Performance"Here/a is a list of their funds with historical performance,br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"3. Fisher Investments/spanbr /a href="http://www.fisherinvestments.com/fisher-investments-philosophy"Here/a is their investing philosophy.br /br /Although I do not have an account with Fisher, I find some of their materials quite in line with my personal investment philosophies. For instance, here are some excerpts and tables from a recent Fisher newsletter:br /br /"In our view, markets are highly likely to rebound sharply in ...

Instead of unloading small-cap and value stocks, portfolio manager is sticking to his guns. But he's shifting into TIPS and away from Treasuries.

 

Tim Courtney admits that financial markets do tend to break down from time to time.

A prime example, says the Oklahoma City, Okla.-based portfolio manager, is what's going on today in markets across the globe.

"But markets have proven to be efficient enough over the longer-term to dissuade us from trying to time a recovery or squeeze any possible excess losses by using individual stocks," said the chief investment officer for Burns Advisory Group, which is headquartered in Oklahoma but has offices in California and Connecticut as well.

Courtney used to work with large institutional investors at Fidelity Investments on developing retirement plans and asset allocation requirements. He joined John Burns, who started the business and serves as its chief executive, in 1997.

These days, Courtney is

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Oil ETFs Get Hammered

Investors are bracing for what could be a severe global recession, while some economists think energy prices could head even lower, says MarketWatch's John Spence. That's putting the squeeze on oil-related exchange-traded funds.

He notes that the PowerShares DB Crude Oil Double Long ETN (NYSEArca: DXO) had lost more than half its value for the month ended Dec. 4, based on Morningstar data. 

You can read the story here. 

 

The Advantages Of Using ETFs To Short Stocks

Individual investors are better equipped these days to short-sell stock, says SmartMoney's Daren Fonda. He points to risks involved with shorting individual stocks and notes the growing popularity of ETFs dedicated to taking short positions with different indexes.

"And while short selling has been demonized by regulators who blame much of the market’s crash on the practice—causing the Securities and Exchange Commission to temporarily ban the

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Citigroup Inc. (C) today (Monday) unveiled plans to cut more than 50,000 jobs in the “near term” and slash expenses by 20% to preserve capital as it faces a global slowdown that’s expected to push well into 2009.

The cuts are on top of the 23,000 jobs eliminated so far this year. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit plans to whittle the company’s workforce down to 300,000. By the time Pandit puts down the machete, he’ll have lopped off about 20% of the company’s headcount since Citigroup’s peak.

Just last week, Citigroup announced the release of 10,000 employees in addition to hiking interest rates an average of 3% for about one-in-five of its credit card holders.

Since the subprime market caved in last year, bank and brokerage firms around the world have shed nearly 160,000 jobs, Bloomberg reported. Citigroup’s plan to let go 50,000 is the largest

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