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

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Matt—in times like these, we just try to do our best to help the nation and the world.

It was great to ring the NASDAQ closing bell on a market that was up about 11%. For anyone who saw the video (and you can see it here), I was genuinely cheering up there. Yesterday, I might have even been cheering in front of my computer screen with the browser set to Yahoo Finance.

The truth is, though, that for us at the Journal of Indexes, boosting the markets to a big day was nothing special. I mean, the LEAST we can do is rally the markets a bit to just do our little part.

All fun aside, though, these markets make me very nervous. This kind of volatility is never a good thing unless you're a trader who makes his or her living scalping other people while the market

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There's no end in sight for ETF volumes. Capitalism is alive and well. So are bad trading ideas. It is obviously no exaggeration to say that ETFs have completely altered the way the people look at the stock market. And for those of you who have been around ETFs for 10 years, making that sort of assertion would have elicited either a chuckle or an "E T What?" ten years ago. And I think that you've really hit the hammer on the nail, Matt, by saying that ETFs are all about trading. We focus on the long-term buy-and-hold side. But that is NOT where the bulk of those hundreds of millions of traded shares daily are going. As I've noted before, ETFs are actually being used (in tremendous volume) by some of the very largest players - including the very largest hedge funds - out there. And that is another assertion ...