The fund may invest up to 35% of total assets in securities of foreign issuers and non-dollar securities, including emerging market securities. As of April 2009, its portfolio turnover was 80%.

Ford Motor Co. (F), ACE Ltd. (ACE) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) are among the fund’s key holdings.

Hartford Global Technology A (HGTAX) seeks long-term capital appreciation by investing in stocks of technology companies worldwide.

The fund uses bottom-up security selection based on fundamental research and valuation analysis to determine favorable investment opportunities not yet recognized by the market. It has an expense ratio of 0.98%.

The fund pays dividends and capital gains annually.

Hartford Global Financial Services A (HGFAX) was incepted in October 2000. The investment seeks long-term capital appreciation.

The fund normally invests at least 80% of total assets in equity securities of financial services companies worldwide. It may invest in banks, savings and loan associations, mortgage banking companies, insurance companies, securities brokers, asset management companies, leasing companies and consumer and industrial finance companies.

Mark T. Lynch has been lead manager at the fund since October 2005.

Chicago, IL – September 17, 2009 – Zacks.com releases the latest Zacks Industry Rank. Stocks featured in this week’s analysis include D.R. Horton (DHI), KB Home (KBH), Pulte Homes (PHM), Allstate (ALL), Hartford Financial Services (HIG), Travelers (TRV), Loews (L), Humana (HUM), Stericycle (SRCL), C.R. Baird (BCR), Celgene (CELG), Gilead Sciences (GILD), Anadarko Petroleum (APC), EOG Resources (EOG), AK Steel (AKS), Nucor (NUE), U.S. Steel (X), Fifth Third (FITB), Regions Financial (RF), Suntrust Banks (STI) and Zions Bancorp (ZION).

Zacks Industry Rank Analysis is written by Charles Rotblut, CFA, Senior Market Analyst for Zacks.com.

This week: Third-Quarter Earnings Forecast

Though the economy has stabilized, third-quarter results for the majority of companies will still be below year prior levels.

Per share profits for the S&P 500 are projected to fall 15.4%. The median company is forecast to report a 14% drop in per share earnings. (The difference being that the S&P 500 forecast is a weighted projection.) More than 340 companies may have experienced a year-over-year drop in profits.

On a revenue basis, things are not much better. Median company sales are forecast to have dropped 7.2%.* More than 360 companies are expected to report a year-over-year drop in earnings.

It's important to realize that during July and August 2008, the economy was in fairly good shape. Lehman did not collapse until September 2008. Furthermore, the credit crunch's grip severely tightened over the 2-month span of September and October 2008. As a result, many companies are now facing tough comparisons, meaning year-over-over declines in profits now.

It should be noted, however, that not all comparisons will be difficult. In fact, some industries are forecast to report actual earnings growth.

Industries Likely To Show Growth

Homebuilders

It may sound shocking, but homebuilders are likely to have some of the best year-over-year comparisons in terms of profitability.

There are 2 reasons for this. First, conditions in the housing industry were deteriorating last year, with mortgages becoming increasingly hard to get. Second, the housing market is now stabilizing, as is evidenced by the rising number of new and existing home sales.

This change will allow D.R. Horton (DHI), KB Home (KBH) and Pulte Homes (PHM) to encourage shareholders with bottom line improvements by 50% or more. The improvements are relative, however, since all 3 companies will report sizable losses for Q309.

Insurance

Several insurance companies could impress investors with double-digit growth. Though some, like Allstate (ALL) and Hartford Financial Services (HIG), have the benefit of prior-year losses, others like Travelers (TRV) and Loews (L) are experiencing true growth. (Revenues and earnings will rise for TRV and L).

The surprisingly calm hurricane season (fingers crossed that it stays this way) has helped property and causality insurers. Nearly all insurance companies have also benefited from the rebound in the financial markets. The economy is a drag, though there seem to be certain segments where premiums are rising.

Health Care

Despite all the talk about reform, profits for the entire medical sector continue to rise. The sector is less economically sensitive and less affected by swings in commodity prices. As result, several medical companies are likely growing both revenues and earnings this quarter.

Those with the strongest growth rates will include Humana (HUM), Stericycle (SRCL), C.R. Baird (BCR), Celgene (CELG) and Gilead Sciences (GILD).

Industries Likely to Report Contraction

Commodity-Related

Commodity-related companies face the toughest year-over-year comparisons. Oil peaked in July 2008 and, though the commodity bubble deflated throughout the remainder of the quarter, profits were still very, very strong. As a result, energy and metals companies are projected to report significant drops in Q309 profits.

In the Energy sector, exploration & production (E&P) companies such as Anadarko Petroleum (APC) and EOG Resources (EOG) will report the biggest declines. Among metals companies, AK Steel (AKS), Nucor (NUE) and U.S. Steel (X) could all report losses after large profits in Q308.

Banks

Though government intervention has stabilized much of the financial sector, many banks remain unprofitable. High unemployment, a sustained high level of foreclosures and a weak commercial real estate market are all problem spots for the sector. As a result, analysts are projecting Fifth Third (FITB), Regions Financial (RF), Suntrust Banks (STI) and Zions Bancorp (ZION) to post losses.

It's All About Expectations

The one positive for the third-quarter earnings season is that there is a general expectation that the numbers will be bad. Therefore, even those companies that report losses will be measured up against the consensus estimates and not the year prior results. What we could well see is a repeat of second-quarter earnings season, where brokerage analyst forecasts proved to be too pessimistic.

As always, pay attention to guidance and the level of visibility companies have about the fourth quarter and the early part of 2010. The markets will want assurance that business conditions are starting to improve, even if sales still remain at depressed levels.

*12 companies were excluded from the revenue forecasts due to a lack of broker estimates. The inclusion of these companies would have not significantly altered the median revenue forecast.

Zacks "Profit from the Pros " e-mail newsletter offers continuous coverage of the industries and the stocks poised to outperform the market. Subscribe to this free newsletter today by visiting http://at.zacks.com/?id=5611.

About Zacks

Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978 by Leonard Zacks. As a PhD in mathematics Len knew he could find patterns in stock market data that would lead to superior investment results. Amongst his many accomplishments was the formation of his proprietary stock picking system; the Zacks Rank, which continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3:1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Register for your free subscription to Profit From the Pros by going to http://at.zacks.com/?id=5610.

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Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Zacks-Investment-Research/57553657748?ref=ts

Visit http://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.

Zacks Investment Research is under common control with affiliated entities (including a broker-dealer and an investment adviser), which may engage in transactions involving the foregoing securities for the clients of such affiliates.

Disclaimer: Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should always research companies and securities before making any investments. Nothing herein should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security.

Contact: Charles Rotblut, CFA
Company: Zacks.com
Phone: 312-265-9352
Email: pr@zacks.com
Visit: www.zacks.com

Per share profits for the S&P 500 are projected to fall 15.4%. The median company is forecast to report a 14% drop in per share earnings. (The difference being that the S&P 500 forecast is a weighted projection.) More than 340 companies may have experienced a year-over-year drop in profits.

On a revenue basis, things are not much better. Median company sales are forecast to have dropped 7.2%.* More than 360 companies are expected to report a year-over-year drop in earnings.

It's important to realize that during July and August 2008, the economy was in fairly good shape. Lehman did not collapse until September 2008. Furthermore, the credit crunch's grip severely tightened over the 2-month span of September and October 2008. As a result, many companies are now facing tough comparisons, meaning year-over-over declines in profits now.

It should be noted, however, that not all comparisons will be difficult. In fact, some industries are forecast to report actual earnings growth.

Industries Likely To Show Growth

Homebuilders

It may sound shocking, but homebuilders are likely to have some of the best year-over-year comparisons in terms of profitability.

There are 2 reasons for this. First, conditions in the housing industry were deteriorating last year, with mortgages becoming increasingly hard to get. Second, the housing market is now stabilizing, as is evidenced by the rising number of new and existing home sales.

This change will allow D.R. Horton (DHI), KB Home (KBH) and Pulte Homes (PHM) to encourage shareholders with bottom line improvements by 50% or more. The improvements are relative, however, since all 3 companies will report sizable losses for Q309.

Insurance

Several insurance companies could impress investors with double-digit growth. Though some, like Allstate (ALL) and Hartford Financial Services (HIG), have the benefit of prior-year losses, others like Travelers (TRV) and Loews (L) are experiencing true growth. (Revenues and earnings will rise for TRV and L).

The surprisingly calm hurricane season (fingers crossed that it stays this way) has helped property and causality insurers. Nearly all insurance companies have also benefited from the rebound in the financial markets. The economy is a drag, though there seem to be certain segments where premiums are rising.

Health Care

Despite all the talk about reform, profits for the entire medical sector continue to rise. The sector is less economically sensitive and less affected by swings in commodity prices. As result, several medical companies are likely growing both revenues and earnings this quarter.

Those with the strongest growth rates will include Humana (HUM), Stericycle (SRCL), C.R. Baird (BCR), Celgene (CELG) and Gilead Sciences (GILD).

Industries Likely to Report Contraction

Commodity-Related

Commodity-related companies face the toughest year-over-year comparisons. Oil peaked in July 2008 and, though the commodity bubble deflated throughout the remainder of the quarter, profits were still very, very strong. As a result, energy and metals companies are projected to report significant drops in Q309 profits.

In the Energy sector, exploration & production (E&P) companies such as Anadarko Petroleum (APC) and EOG Resources (EOG) will report the biggest declines. Among metals companies, AK Steel (AKS), Nucor (NUE) and U.S. Steel (X) could all report losses after large profits in Q308.

Banks

Though government intervention has stabilized much of the financial sector, many banks remain unprofitable. High unemployment, a sustained high level of foreclosures and a weak commercial real estate market are all problem spots for the sector. As a result, analysts are projecting Fifth Third (FITB), Regions Financial (RF), Suntrust Banks (STI) and Zions Bancorp (ZION) to post losses.

It's All About Expectations

The one positive for the third-quarter earnings season is that there is a general expectation that the numbers will be bad. Therefore, even those companies that report losses will be measured up against the consensus estimates and not the year prior results. What we could well see is a repeat of second-quarter earnings season, where brokerage analyst forecasts proved to be too pessimistic.

As always, pay attention to guidance and the level of visibility companies have about the fourth quarter and the early part of 2010. The markets will want assurance that business conditions are starting to improve, even if sales still remain at depressed levels.

Sector Rank as of Sep 16
Sector	This Week's Zacks Rank	Last Week's Zacks Rank	FY09 Revisions Ratio	FY09 Estimates Revised Up	FY09 Estimates Revised Down
Consumer Staples	2.63	2.65	2.40	168	70
Conglomerates	2.73	2.73	4.67	14	3
Retail-Wholesale	2.76	2.74	1.88	506	269
Auto-Tires-Trucks	2.77	2.76	0.73	22	30
Computer and Technology	2.90	2.91	2.19	599	273
Medical	2.93	2.96	1.30	193	149
Construction	2.97	2.97	1.20	53	44
Basic Materials	2.98	3.02	1.55	118	76
Consumer Discretionary	3.00	2.97	1.05	122	116
Oils-Energy	3.00	3.01	0.87	238	274
Utilities	3.02	3.03	0.89	55	62
Industrial Products	3.05	3.03	1.36	87	64
Business Services	3.08	3.01	0.97	30	31
Finance	3.13	3.09	1.07	335	312
Aerospace	3.23	3.23	0.33	19	58
Transportation	3.23	3.23	0.70	81	115

View the Zacks Industry Rank List at http://www.zacks.com/zrank/zrank_inds.php. This interactive list allows you to see all of the companies, and their Zacks Rank, within more than 200 industries. The table above is the Zacks Sector Rank List, which shows the trend in estimate revisions on a broader scale.

*12 companies were excluded from the revenue forecasts due to a lack of broker estimates. The inclusion of these companies would have not significantly altered the median revenue forecast.Zacks Investment Research

Today, we're fortunate to have Simon van Norden, Professor of Finance at HEC Montréal (École des Hautes Études Commerciales), as a guest blogger.

"Once you've seen one financial market crisis...you've seen one financial market crisis."

-- Attributed to Federal Reserve Board Governor Kevin Warsh by former US Treasury Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Phillip Swagel in The Financial Crisis: an Inside View, March 2009, p. 4.

The financial crisis has set a lot of records so far; it's certainly the worst US banking crisis of my lifetime. Some, as suggested by the above quote, see such crises as unique events; each one is singular and there's not much to be learned about how to handle one from looking at past crises. For example, there's no precedent that I know of for a banking crisis involves the failure of the biggest counterparties for credit default swaps.

I think a much smaller number of people see the crisis differently; they think of it as another potato, a big one. No two potatoes are exactly alike in size and shape, but they all taste pretty much the same and you can use the same recipe for most of them. For that reason, it's interesting to see to what extent the current crisis behaves like other crises, even if it has some unique features.

I think there's some interesting parallels between the current crisis, the Savings and Loan (S&L) crisis of the 80s and 90s, and the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) Crisis of 1998. But before I talk about that, let me talk about what a "typical" banking crisis looks like.

The Basel View of "Typical" Banking Crises

If we set the way-back machine to 2004, a time long before terms like ARM, CDS, and AIG entered common conversation, we can see what people thought a typical bank crisis looked like. That's the year the guys in Basel who worry about such things published "Bank Failures in Mature Economies." They looked at the main banking crises in developed countries from 1980 to 2000 and asked themselves what they saw. To be sure, they saw some differences, but they also saw some patterns. Here's part of their main conclusions (note that "credit risk" is Banker for "bad loans").

Most of the widespread [banking] failures required some amount of public support, sometimes in very large amounts. All of the episodes that involved large amounts of public support were caused by credit risk problems. ...The widespread banking crises that involved credit risk were remarkably similar. A period of financial deregulation resulted in rapid growth in lending, particularly in real estate related lending. Rapidly rising real estate prices encouraged more lending, abetted by lax regulatory systems in many cases. When economic recessions occurred, inflated real estate prices collapsed, leading directly to the failures. (BIS, 2004, p.66)

That sounds a lot like what the US (and some other countries) experienced immediately afterwards. There had been some financial deregulation, which was followed by a period of very rapid growth in real-estate-related lending. Rapidly rising real estate values encouraged more lending. The biggest difference seems to be the last point; the recession did not cause real estate prices to collapse; they had peaked by 2006 and fell before the recession started. We could probably also argue about whether it was financial deregulation or "financial innovation that avoided regulations" that helped fuel the increase in real-estate lending. However, in this view the boom and bust cycle in real estate, the subsequent fallout for the banking sector, and the need for a major publicly-funded bailout is not remarkable; we've seen this kind of story before. In fact, Reinhart and Rogoff have gone so far as to tabulate what happens to government debt in the aftermath of a banking crisis. They find that real government debt increases by an average of 86% in the three years after the start of a crisis. So regardless of how you feel about the US government's spending during the crisis, it seems less remarkable when compared to what typically happens in a banking crisis.

Three American Financial Market Crises

More support for the view that banking crises follow similar patterns can be found by comparing the last three US banking crises; the S&L crisis of the late 80s and early 90s, the collapse of LTCM and the most recent crisis. The S&L crisis closely followed the pattern described by the BIS report quoted above; financial deregulation, followed by a rapid growth in real estate lending, creation of local speculative bubbles in real estate prices, and the failure of institutions as bubbles burst (For descriptions of the S&L crisis, see BIS (2004) or the GAO 1996 report). The General Accounting Office put the cost of the S&L bailout to US taxpayers at $132.1 billion, or a bit under 2% of GDP (United States General Accounting Office (1996) "Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation's 1994 and 1995 Financial Statements," Table 3 and author's calculations). That may seem small compared to the size of TARP or this year's projected federal deficit, but it was shocking at the time.

At first glance, the LTCM crisis appears quite different; no bank failed (LTCM was a hedge fund), its failure was unrelated to real estate investment or credit risk, and the crisis was resolved at no cost to the taxpayer. However, the LTCM crisis showed that, as a result of deregulation, a systemic crisis could start outside the regulated banking system. Another GAO study noted:

The LTCM case illustrated that market discipline can break down and showed that potential systemic risk can be posed not only by a cascade of major firm failures, but also by leveraged trading positions. LTCM was able to establish leveraged trading positions of a size that posed potential systemic risk primarily because the banks and securities and futures firms that were its creditors and counterparties failed to enforce their own risk management standards. (US GAO (1999) p. 29)

The same report noted:

• Gaps in [US Government agencies'] regulatory authority limits their ability to identify and mitigate systemic risk (US GAO (1999) p. 24)
• Regulators did not identify weaknesses in firms' risk management practices until after the crisis (US GAO (1999) p. 16)
• Monitoring did not reveal the potential systemic threat posed by LTCM (US GAO (1999) p. 17)

and provided a variety of proposals (some of which are mentioned below) to reform the financial system by reducing systemic risks.

The success of those reforms can be judged by role of similar factors in the most recent US banking crisis. An important factor in the latter has been the role of trading in derivative securities, primarily mortgage-based securities and credit default swaps (CDS). Again, government oversight of this market was limited due to faith in the market's ability to manage its exposure to risk, and was further weakened by divided responsibilities between multiple agencies. Regulators and private lenders alike were again unaware of major firms' exposure to losses on derivative securities; this time even the heads of major financial institutions were not aware of the extent of their own exposures. Again, this was in part due to the lack of transparency, lack of clearing and high leverage afforded by trade in Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives (particularly those traded at Bear Stearns.) Again, weaknesses in firms' risk management practices became apparent only in hindsight. Again, major financial firms that were not regulated as traditional deposit-taking banks took on highly-leveraged positions and posed major systemic threats to the banking system. These included several investment banks (such as Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and CitiGroup) and the insurance company AIG.

Conclusion

Looking at recent events from this perspective, I still see the size of the losses as breathtaking, but the causes and dynamics seem much more familiar. What bothers me is that some of the suggested solutions sound pretty familiar too; make derivative trading more transparent, improve coordination among the regulators, give regulators more power to control systemic risk in new places, and so on. Despite that, not only was there another crisis, but it was much larger than the two previous crises combined.

This post written by Simon van Norden.

Chicago, IL – August 27, 2009 – Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: United Heathcare Group (UNH), Aetna (AET), Wet Seal Inc. (WTSLA), VeriSign Inc. (VRSN) and Syniverse Holdings Inc. (SVR).

Get the most recent insight from Zacks Equity Research with the free Profit from the Pros newsletter: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5513

Here are highlights from Wednesday’s Analyst Blog:

CBO Overstates Healthcare Costs

Some of the more outrageous types of misconduct by the likes of United Heathcare Group (UNH) and Aetna (AET) might be curbed, such as the cancelling of policies as soon as someone gets sick and puts in a substantial claim. Morally, that is just plain fraud ("You didn't tell us that you went to see a dermatologist for your acne when you were 16, so we will not cover your cancer treatment at age 55"), although the insurance companies have very good lawyers who write the contracts to make sure they can get away with it.

It might even end the practice of discriminating against sick people (aka pre-existing conditions). It will come at the expense of using the force of law to get the young and the healthy to buy coverage. Since the young, on average, seldom make expensive claims, those customers would be a gold mine for the insurance companies.

None of those things are likely to stop the relentless rise in Health Care costs as a share of GDP. The nation may go bankrupt, but the health insurance companies will not. They will be even more prosperous than they are today. Their investment in people like Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Kent Conrad (D-ND) has to go down as one of the most profitable in history.

Wet Seal Reports Modest Results

Wet Seal Inc. (WTSLA) reported modest results for the second quarter with earnings of 3 cents per share, which was in-line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate. However, earnings were down 9 cents year-over-year. Wet Seal is a specialty retailer, operating apparel and accessory items stores for female customers in the U.S.

Net sales for the quarter declined 8.5% year-over-year to $136.4 million. However, Internet sales grew 12.7% year-over-year. Overall comparable same-store sales declined 10.6%. Comparable same-store sales in the Wet Seal segment declined 11.9%, and at the Arden B segment it declined 4.1% year-over-year.

VeriSign Divests Messaging Biz

VeriSign Inc. (VRSN) yesterday agreed to sell its messaging business to Syniverse Holdings Inc. (SVR) for $175 million. The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, VeriSign provides essential Internet infrastructure services to companies, service providers and website owners.

Tampa, Florida-based Syniverse provides wireless voice and data services for telecommunications companies worldwide. The company said that the deal will expand its mobile messaging capabilities and increase its global footprint through nearly 300 additional employees in the United States and Asia Pacific.

The messaging business has had an annual revenue run-rate of approximately $140 million over the last 12 months. With this divestiture, VeriSign will be left with only one of its thirteen businesses to divest. From November 2007 to date, the company has sold twelve non-core units for $750 million. The business which remains to be sold is Global Security Consulting.

Want more from Zacks Equity Research? Subscribe to the free Profit from the Pros newsletter: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5515.

About Zacks Equity Research

Zacks Equity Research provides the best of quantitative and qualitative analysis to help investors know what stocks to buy and which to sell for the long-term.

Continuous coverage is provided for a universe of 1,150 publicly traded stocks. Our analysts are organized by industry which gives them keen insights to developments that affect company profits and stock performance. Recommendations and target prices are six-month time horizons.

Zacks "Profit from the Pros" e-mail newsletter provides highlights of the latest analysis from Zacks Equity Research. Subscribe to this free newsletter today: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5517

About Zacks

Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978 by Leonard Zacks. As a PhD in mathematics Len knew he could find patterns in stock market data that would lead to superior investment results. Amongst his many accomplishments was the formation of his proprietary stock picking system; the Zacks Rank, which continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Register for your free subscription to Profit from the Pros at http://at.zacks.com/?id=5518.

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Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zacksresearch

Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Zacks-Investment-Research/57553657748?ref=ts

Disclaimer: Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should always research companies and securities before making any investments. Nothing herein should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security.

Contact:
Mark Vickery
Web Content Editor
312-265-9380
Visit: www.zacks.com

Chicago, IL – August 27, 2009 – Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: China Life Insurance Company (LFC), American International Group (AIG), Deutsche Bank (DB), Morgan Stanley (MS) and Amgen (AMGN).

Get the most recent insight from Zacks Equity Research with the free Profit from the Pros newsletter: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5513

Here are highlights from Wednesday’s Analyst Blog:

China Life’s Profits Grow

China Life Insurance Company (LFC), the leading life insurer in China, has posted a 15% rise in profits in the first half of 2009 compared to the prior-year period. The company earned 18.2 billion yuan ($2.7 billion) in the first half of 2009 driven by gains realized on financial investments. The gains stemmed from the capital market rally in China.

Gross yield on its investments in the period was up 3.27% from 2.31%. Gross written premiums and policy fees were up 11% to 87.86 billion yuan. The increase was mainly attributable to an increase in its insurance business. Renewal premiums grew 23% year-over-year, while the proportion of renewal premiums to gross written premiums increased to 66.84% in the first half of 2009 from 60.44% in the year-ago period.

The company said that it may invest in AIA, which is planning a Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO). AIA is the Asia unit of American International Group (AIG), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Morgan Stanley (MS) have been appointed by AIG as its joint global coordinators for a more than $4 billion IPO for AIA. The company is also eyeing an equity tie-up with Agricultural Bank of China. However, the company does not intend to sell its 5.1% stake in Minsheng Banking Corporation.

The company is also a leading provider of annuity products and life insurance for both individuals and groups and a leading provider of accident and health insurance. China Life’s market share in the first half of 2009 was approximately 39.2%.

Amgen’s Kidney Drug Fails

Yesterday, Amgen (AMGN) said that Aranesp failed in a large, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase III study that was conducted in patients with chronic kidney disease (not requiring dialysis), anemia and type II diabetes.

The study, referred to as the Trial to Reduce Cardiovascular Endpoints with Aranesp Therapy (TREAT), had two primary endpoints. The first evaluated time to all-cause mortality or cardiovascular morbidity including heart attack, congestive heart failure, hospitalization for angina, or stroke. The second primary endpoint evaluated time to all-cause mortality or chronic dialysis.

Aranesp could not show statistically significant improvement in either. While a higher number of strokes were observed in the Aranesp-treated group compared to the placebo arm, we note that drug’s label already carries a warning regarding the stroke events.

Full efficacy and safety analyses are yet to take place. Amgen will present full results at an upcoming medical meeting later this year.

Want more from Zacks Equity Research? Subscribe to the free Profit from the Pros newsletter: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5515.

About Zacks Equity Research

Zacks Equity Research provides the best of quantitative and qualitative analysis to help investors know what stocks to buy and which to sell for the long-term.

Continuous coverage is provided for a universe of 1,150 publicly traded stocks. Our analysts are organized by industry which gives them keen insights to developments that affect company profits and stock performance. Recommendations and target prices are six-month time horizons.

Zacks "Profit from the Pros" e-mail newsletter provides highlights of the latest analysis from Zacks Equity Research. Subscribe to this free newsletter today: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5517

About Zacks

Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978 by Leonard Zacks. As a PhD in mathematics Len knew he could find patterns in stock market data that would lead to superior investment results. Amongst his many accomplishments was the formation of his proprietary stock picking system; the Zacks Rank, which continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Register for your free subscription to Profit from the Pros at http://at.zacks.com/?id=5518.

Visit http://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zacksresearch

Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Zacks-Investment-Research/57553657748?ref=ts

Disclaimer: Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should always research companies and securities before making any investments. Nothing herein should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security.

Contact:
Mark Vickery
Web Content Editor
312-265-9380
Visit: www.zacks.com

Chicago, IL – August 24, 2009 – Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), Amgen (AMGN), Genzyme (GENZ), Aetna (AET) and United Health (UNH).

Get the most recent insight from Zacks Equity Research with the free Profit from the Pros newsletter: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5513

Here are highlights from Friday’s Analyst Blog:

Healthcare Reform - Potential Winners

Regardless of what you think about the drug companies, they are not going anywhere. The pharmaceutical lobby has made certain that it has a seat at the table and it seems probable that any new laws will benefit them. Even though some concessions will be made, the Obama Administration has quietly signaled a willingness not to pursue the most beneficial cost-saving strategies.

Potential winners not only include large drug companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), but also biotechs such as Amgen (AMGN) and Genzyme (GENZ).

Despite talk about a public option, the insurance companies are not going quietly into the night. Not only do these companies have a large number of lobbyists, they are also major employers. This makes dismantling the current system very unrealistic and extremely expensive.

Even if the insurers are forced to make big concessions, they could potentially gain millions in new members. Plus, any reduction in medical costs should ultimately help their bottom lines.

Potential winners include Aetna (AET) and United Health (UNH).

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The inquiry is in an effort to change the debate to focus on health insurers rather than focusing on the solutions to health care concerns. There was also dispute over the creation of a government-run health system along private insurers. The Democrats are trying to examine whether business practices of the industry oppose Obama’s proposal for a public health insurance plan.

The US House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman sent letters to 52 insurance companies on Monday, asking them to provide details on CEO pay, profit and other data by next month. These include American International Group Inc. (AIG), Hartford Financial Services (HIG), Aetna Inc. (AET), Aflac Inc. (AFL), Humana Inc. (HUM) and Cigna Corp. (CI).

Banks and Wall Street investment firms have also faced criticism over executive pay and bonuses and corporate spending in the light of government bailouts. Even though some large financial firms have redeemed warrants issued under Troubled Asset Relief Program, most of them still have short-term debt guaranteed by the government. Thus, Bank of America (BAC), Goldman Sachs (GS) and JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) were targeted by various political and media groups.

In March, 2009, Fitch Ratings had downgraded MGIC’s long-term issuer and senior debt to 'B' from 'BBB-' and junior subordinated debt rating to 'C' from 'BB' previously.

On Thursday before the opening bell, MGIC reported a loss of $2.74 per share for the second quarter of 2009. Following the results, management announced a reorganization of its core mortgage insurance business by capitalizing MGIC Indemnity Corp with $1 billion. The capitalization will be funded from existing cash and investments.

We doubt management's assertion that it has sufficient resources to settle the claims. Therefore we maintain a sell recommendation for MGIC.

Ever since the end of the housing market boom in 2006, MGIC, the largest private mortgage insurer has been facing difficult business conditions as borne out by its results. Mounting mortgage delinquencies have made matters difficult for the mortgage insurer, which has been reporting losses since the second half of 2007.

Other private mortgage insurers who have suffered rating downgrades since the housing downturn include United Guaranty Residential Insurance (UGRIC), Radian Guaranty (Radian MI), PMI Mortgage Insurance (PMI). Private Mortgage Insurers mostly help banks and other lenders recover their costs in the event of a homeowner defaulting on home loan payments.

Chicago, IL - July 2, 2009 - Zacks Equity Research highlights AMAG Pharmaceuticals Inc. (AMAG) as the Bull of the Day and Palm, Inc. (PALM) the Bear of the Day. In addition, Zacks Equity Research provides analysis on Everest Re (RE), Ace Limited (ACE) and Montpelier (MRH).

Full analysis of all these stocks is available at http://at.zacks.com/?id=2676.

Here is a synopsis of all five stocks:

Bull of the Day:

AMAG Pharmaceuticals Inc. (AMAG) develops superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for use in pharmaceutical products. The company's focus is on developing IV iron replacement therapy for anemia in chronic kidney disease and imaging agent to aid in diagnosis.

The company filed the NDA for its lead drug Feraheme in December 2007, and the drug was approved by the FDA on June 30, 2009. Clinical data in over 1,700 patients indicate an excellent safety profile for the drug with lower incidents of heart problems.

Clinical results and eventual approval for additional indications should ensure strong growth in the coming years. We maintain our Buy rating on the shares of AMAG with a target price of $62.

Bear of the Day:

Although 4Q09 revenue declined by 70.7% y-o-y and the loss increased y-o-y, results for Palm, Inc. (PALM) quarter were better than expected due to the ramp up in Treo Pro shipments and strong domestic and international carrier interest in its Web OS platform.

Although Palm has had some initial success with the Pre, its next-gen phone, we have doubts on its success as it competes with several much larger competitors such as BlackBerry and iPhone. As the Palm Pre was launched in June, we expect that its impact will be better reflected in the first quarter of fiscal 2010.

Palm has struggled to match supply with demand for the new handset. We have a low confidence on long-term prospects, so we reiterate our Sell rating on Palm but raise our six-month price target to $8.00.

Latest Posts on the Zacks Analyst Blog:

Reinsurance Rates Stable

In the first half of 2009, the reinsurance industry has not experienced any major underwriting losses. Also, there are some early signs of recovery in the financial sector. In addition, reinsurance companies took some desperate steps in the early part of 2009 to curb any significant deterioration in their balance sheets.

We also remain concerned about the primary insurance market, where there is still an absence of meaningful rate increases. Further, in the U.S. Casualty market, some new insurance companies are entering and thereby bringing in more capital in the industry and resulting in significant rate competition.

Though companies such as Everest Re (RE), Ace Limited (ACE) and Montpelier (MRH) have experienced rates increases this year; we believe that this "sufficient availability of capital" in the market will restrict any hefty rate increases in the industry and hence confine the top-line growth of the companies.

Get the full analysis of all these stocks by going to http://at.zacks.com/?id=5507.

About the Bull and Bear of the Day

Every day, the analysts at Zacks Equity Research select two stocks that are likely to outperform (Bull) or underperform (Bear) the markets over the next 3-6 months.

About the Analyst Blog

Updated throughout every trading day, the Analyst Blog provides analysis from Zacks Equity Research about the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets.

About Zacks Equity Research

Zacks Equity Research provides the best of quantitative and qualitative analysis to help investors know what stocks to buy and which to sell for the long-term.

Continuous analyst coverage is provided for a universe of 1,150 publicly traded stocks. Our analysts are organized by industry which gives them keen insights to developments that affect company profits and stock performance. Recommendations and target prices are six-month time horizons.

Zacks "Profit from the Pros" e-mail newsletter provides highlights of the latest analysis from Zacks Equity Research. Subscribe to this free newsletter today by visiting http://at.zacks.com/?id=5508.

About Zacks

Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978 by Leonard Zacks. As a PhD in mathematics Len knew he could find patterns in stock market data that would lead to superior investment results. Amongst his many accomplishments was the formation of his proprietary stock picking system; the Zacks Rank, which continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Register for your free subscription to Profit from the Pros at http://at.zacks.com/?id=5509.

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Conseco Inc.'s (CNO) share price has steadily gained momentum in the last few months after touching record lows in March 2009. The company recently announced two events that could benefit its risk-based capital ratio.

Conseco has announced that two insurance companies in its Conseco Insurance Group segment will coinsure about 104,000 non-core life insurance policies with a Minnesota-based reinsurance firm Wilton Reassurance Company ("Wilton Re"). In the transaction, Wilton Re will pay a ceding commission of approximately $57.5 million and 100% coinsure and administer these policies.

The Conseco companies will be transferred to Wilton Re for approximately $409 million in cash, policy loans, $466 million of statutory policy and other reserves. The transaction is expected to be completed in 3Q09. As a result of this deal, Conseco expects to record an increase in its deferred tax valuation allowance of approximately $18 million and a deferred gain of approximately $25 million in 3Q09.

The transaction is expected to help streamline the company's administrative operations by shifting focus on core insurance businesses, increasing statutory capital and be benefiting to risk-based capital ratio by 8 percentage points.

Further, Conseco expects the recent National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) move of modifying the mortgage experience adjustment factor for 2009 to benefit its risk-based capital ratio. The revised calculation will reduce the amount of capital Conseco's insurance subsidiaries are required to hold, thereby increasing its consolidated risk-based capital ratio by more than 25 basis points. However, we believe that the NAIC may modify, extend or even terminate the proposal beyond 2009 based on market conditions.

We also remain concerned about the quality of Conseco's investment portfolio. The company had approximately $43.7 million (market value) of subprime home equity securities (0.20% of total portfolio) as of March 31, of which $17.6 million (0.18% of invested assets) had a rating of "A" or less.

We believe that our concerns are already reflected in the current share price and that CNO continues to be one of the cheapest stocks compared to its peer group even after gaining sufficient momentum in the recent months.

At its current price level, the shares of Conseco trade at 0.28x its 1Q09 book value of $18.57 per diluted share (excluding AOCI), about 60% discount to the 0.69x median of the peer group. This compares to price-to-book value of approximately 100% of its rivals like Unum Group (UNM), Torchmark Corp. (TMK) and StanCorp Financial Group Inc. (SFG).

Therefore, we maintain our Hold recommendation on the shares of Conseco.

As part of the festivities surrounding the 2009 Journal of Indexes editorial board meeting, IndexUniverse.com hosted a live webinar with Vanguard founder and index industry legend John Bogle.

During the one-hour presentation, Mr. Bogle unveiled new research regarding how successful (or not) investors are when trading exchange-traded funds, and took a big picture look at the state of American finance.

Moderated by JoI editor and IndexUniverse.com publisher Jim Wiandt, the webinar features an extensive audience Q&A session. A full transcript follows below.

Jim Wiandt, editor, Journal of Indexes (Wiandt): Good morning everyone, and welcome to a very special event that we have here today. We are actually at the NASDAQ market site and we have the Journal of Indexes editorial board meeting today.

We have a very special guest to present today at our webinar. John Bogle is a legend. He is an icon and is really the father of indexing and sensible asset allocation for average investors. We are delighted to have Mr. Bogle here today.

He is going to go through a series of slides, some of which are extremely interesting and very pertinent, which speak to the way the index industry has evolved in recent years.

The format for today will be first, Mr. Bogle will go through his slides, and then we are going to open things up for questions.

We have all of these slides posted to our Web site, IndexUniverse.com [available here]. Without any further ado, I will turn things over to Mr. Bogle. And, again, we are delighted to have you, Mr. Bogle, and look forward to the presentation.

[Editor’s Note: A replay of the webinar is available here.]

John Bogle, Bogle Financial Markets Center (Bogle): Thank you very much, Jim. And welcome, all you webinar listeners. I presume there are a few Bogle-heads there and I send a special welcome to them.

It’s fun to be with you this morning. I thought I would begin by giving you a report on the status of index funds in mid-2009. I guess the main point I would like to begin with is that we now know what we really suspected, or strongly believed, 25 or 35 years ago when I started the first index fund—that indexing would change the world of investing.

I believe it is now clear that indexing has changed the world of investing in some very remarkable ways. First and most notably, I think we’ve had an odd convergence of indexing in two different areas. Active fund management has become much more like passive fund management—for example, active managers are often quantitative, working off matching indexes or having enhanced index funds or closet index funds. Or when you look at brokerage recommendations, you see they overweight relative to the index or underweight rather than buy or sell. The way we look at investing has been changed by standard indexing.

But even as that has happened, passive indexing has gotten a lot more like active fund management. That is, we use index funds for rapid trading in some very remarkable ways, which I will discuss this morning.

We can go to the first slide there and just take a look at what I will call a triumph of indexing. You see the growth of indexing just in the last 15 years from $24 billion to $914 billion on the equity fund side. Throw in roughly $150 billion of bond fund indexing and you are over $1 trillion—about $1.60 trillion in index money in a long-term stock and bond mutual fund industry that has $6 trillion of assets. So indexing itself now accounts for one-sixth of all the mutual fund assets; quite a remarkable thing.

And so, it’s pretty nice to think that last year, 2008, is probably the best year indexing ever had in terms of performance. For the total stock market and the S&P 500—two good proxies for what is going on in the U.S. market—indexes of those two components put them in about the 65^th percentile [of overall fund performance], outperforming about two-thirds of all mutual fund managers. Sure, the decline was about 37%, but the typical U.S. manager went down about 40%; the typical developed market fund went down about 45 to 50%; and the typical emerging market fund went down 55 to 60%. So on the stock fund side, it was quite a triumph for indexing.

On the bond index fund side, it was even more of a triumph. The total bond market index was up 5% last year, outperforming about 85% of comparable bond funds, thanks largely to a big drop, as most of you may know, in Treasury yield.

So we’ve got this wonderful growth rate. We’ve got a dominant industry position. And yet, some unusual things are happening. We will take a look at what is driving the growth of indexing by looking first at ETFs—exchange-traded index funds. And as the next chart shows, I describe them as a truly great business model. Hear carefully when I say “business model.” We will talk about other kinds of models later on.

You can see in the next chart that ETFs have come from almost nowhere—back in the early 1990s, when the first exchange-traded fund was started—to the fact that they are now actually just a hair behind in terms of equity fund assets the traditional index funds, the kind of funds that Vanguard pretty much runs: $457 billion compared to $460 billion, or $456 billion plus. So the ETFs have proved great competition for the classic index funds, basically what I thought about all those years ago.

I’m often asked, “Who is going to win the war: mutual funds or exchange-traded funds?” That is not a good question, because exchange-traded funds are mutual funds. They are just mutual funds you can trade all day long in real time. We will talk a little bit about that. So what we have is, what is growing is index funds for people who want to trade or who believe that the opportunity to trade or the ability to trade is important, intraday trading; and equity mutual funds, which are more designed for long-term investors.

But going over to the next chart, you will see pretty much what has driven the growth of index funds even more clearly than the previous chart. Exchange-traded funds were about 2% of the index fund business back in about 1997, 1998. By 2000, they got up to about 11%. In 2008-2009, they are 11% of equity fund assets, just exactly the same, almost exactly the same as the 11% in traditional index funds.

So we have had a huge growth rate for ETFs. And in terms of market share, stability in a lot of ways, and maybe disappointing stability in the market share of traditional, classic index funds—old, broad market index funds. But for quite a few years, the cash flow went very much in favor of … active funds over index funds for years and years.

But in 2007, as you can see in this chart, the index funds took in about twice as much in the way of assets as actively managed funds. Last year, index funds took in $200 billion in assets. Active funds lost $250 billion. And this year, index funds are taking in a little bit of money so far. These are annualized numbers for 2009. And the active funds are, again, losing so far, on an annualized basis, about $150 billion this year. So clearly, the trends are there. The trends are also there for traditional index funds versus exchange-traded funds.

You can see on this chart the dominance of exchange-traded funds has really been quite remarkable these last three or four years. Where the traditional index funds were taking $40 or $50 billion a year in net cash flow—a good measure of success in the marketplace—the exchange-traded funds were taking somewhere between $140 billion to $150 billion a year and three or four or five times as much. Whether this is a trend or not is much too early to say.

That has been somewhat reversed here in 2009 with, on an annualized basis, the traditional index funds actually adding about $40 billion, expected to add about $40 million in cash flow—where for the first time ever, exchange-traded funds are actually having cash outflow roughly in the amount of $30 billion annualized this year so far. Whether that is a turn in the tide, only time will tell.

Now, if exchange-traded funds are a brilliant business model, are they a good investment model or, as this next slide asks, are they a flawed investment model? And we know they are a good business model. We know they are great for fund marketers. We know they are great for brokers. We know they are great for investment advisers. We know they are great for institutional speculators. But the question is, what are ETFs doing for individual investors?

That is an interesting question and we have done some research on it, which we are going to unveil here in a little bit for the first time. I come back now to the difference between an exchange-traded fund and a traditional index fund. An exchange-traded fund, to use the quotation from the original ad for the SPDR [NYSE Arca: SPY]: “And now you can trade the market all day long in real time.” That is what the original SPDR was advertised as doing. I’m not exactly sure why anybody would want to trade the market all day long in real time, but that is their slogan.

In many respects, as this chart shows, that idea of using ETFs, exchange-traded funds, for speculation has come true, come more than true, come true in spades. You can look at it any way you want, but look at those turnover rates for share turnover in the SPDRs there. And they are in second: 10,105% turnover last year. Just think of that. There are about 711 million shares outstanding of the SPDRS and they have 8 billion shares traded last year―8 billion shares of SPDRS traded.

And that doesn’t seem to be particularly good, even for those investors. Because while the SPDR had a five-year return of -1.9% a year—it’s been a difficult market—the average investor in SPDRs had a return of -8.2% a year. So you tell me whether all that trading is good for investors or is not good for investors. You can see what you would expect.

On the other more speculative side of the markets, the ETFs trades very heavily. Real estate funds have huge ups and downs. The turnover of the iShares real estate ETF we looked at was 23,977%—to put precision on a number that doesn’t need to be precise.

Obviously, Financial SPDRS were attractive both to buyers and sellers last year, with 9,600% turnover. The NASDAQ QQQs? 8,700%. These are remarkable numbers, suggesting that a great deal of what’s going on in ETFs is a business of very rapid trading among large, institutional investors.

Now, when you look at more normal share turnover, over on the right side of the chart—we just took out of a group of about 38 or 40 funds, the lowest turnover funds. More than about half of them seemed to be Vanguard funds, which have turnover in the range of about 200% per year, far lower than those high percentages. So there is a use for ETFs that doesn’t require the trading that seems to show up in the less speculative part of the market.

How high is a 200% turnover rate? Well, the average mutual fund last year happened to have one of the highest turnover rates in a long time—a 33% redemption rate last year. That’s high, very high as far as I’m concerned. So you can imagine what I think of 200% turnover.

What we are seeing here is the use of funds, of ETFs, for speculation. For the bigger ones and for the more traditional ones, in some sense at least, we have much lower turnover, but still high compared to mutual fund turnover.

If we go to the next chart, we can try to answer the question on the next two charts. Okay, we know how ETFs do. But only in recent years have we found out how the investors in mutual funds do. You can actually calculate these returns, what we call the fund returns or the time-weighted return, or typical rate of return. Something starts at $10 and goes to $11―that’s 10%, not very complicated there. But then we do a dollar-weighted return, an asset-weighted return, to show how investor cash flows influence that return delivered by fund. The reality of life in this business is that it is very rare that investors do as well as the funds themselves.

And that is the point I’m making on this chart with the ETFs. These are all exchange-traded fund groups. You will be familiar with the groups: large-cap blend, large-cap growth and value, same in the mid-caps, European, emerging markets, and so on. And you will see that in general, investors lag those returns, just glancing at those numbers, by 5% or 6% a year of return. [That is, they earn] 5% or 6% less than the fund, than the ETF itself earns, showing that the trading is done in an unfortunate way in terms of timing.

The numbers shown over on the right side of this chart are unbelievably consistent. For example, on that page there are 46 ETFs, and in 40 cases out of 46, the investor returns lag the funds return. This is not an aberration. This is a very consistent return, which you will see again if we will flip over to the next chart, which just shows some additional subsectors of the market, in the ETF form, with the investor return and the investor lag.

You can see in some cases―the financial case, for example―the fund’s return trail the index return by almost 11% per year over the last five years. The investors had a negative return of almost 29% over the last five years, a lag in return of almost 18% a year. It is hard to believe. And there, 100% of the funds lag the index. So when you put those two charts together and add them up, out of 79 exchange-traded funds that we covered, 68 of them had investor returns that were either substantially, significantly, or moderately at least short of the returns earned by the funds themselves.

So if you want to take some kind of a simplified average and say that fund returns were generally negative to about 1% a year, and the investor returns on average were negative about 3.5% a year—I’m sorry. The fund returns happened to be positive, thanks to energy and utilities and emerging markets and such segments as that, just a simple average of positive 1%. You find the ETF returns averaged about 6% on these charts, accumulated over five years. But investor returns, if you take -3.5% with negative compounding over five years, investor returns were about -12%.

So when you put plus 6% for the five-year total return for the fund and -12% for the five-year total return for the investor, you are talking about 18% of investor capital that has been lost by all this trading. Now, you can ask, “Don’t regular mutual funds have this same problem of investor returns lagging the returns of the indexes or returns of the funds they own?” Of course they do, but it is not nearly as bad.

To show that, we will introduce one more chart, which I think will be the last chart I will use, so we can open it to your discussion. We happen to have Vanguard mutual funds that have ETFs, exchange-traded funds, in each of these categories. And we have compared the returns on the Vanguard mutual fund returns on this chart, beginning with large-cap blended funds, large-cap growth, large-cap value, mid-cap blended, small-cap blended, emerging markets and real estate investment trusts. We have a regular fund in those areas, Vanguard does: a regular mutual fund. Those returns are shown near the center section of the chart. And the investor returns on the exchange-traded funds are shown on the right side.

You will see that while the investor lag on the exchange-traded funds and side on the left have remarkably large and significant lags, the actual mutual funds themselves lag here and there, but in general, come very close to the returns earned by the market standard that they are in. So we have evidence, strong evidence, that exchange traded funds―because of the timing that goes on―are not acting in the best interest of investors, or investors are not acting in their own best interest, might be a fairer way to put it. While mutual fund investors have similar problems, they are nowhere near so serious. They are not even in the same league.

So the question I raise is―I suppose a broad, philosophical question―how long can a great business model last if it doesn’t deliver good returns to the investors who rely on it? And that is a question we might chat about. But first, before that, I would like to open the meeting and try to answer any questions any of you might have who were kind enough to attend this morning.

Wiandt: Thank you, Mr. Bogle. We have a lot of good questions. Why don’t we start out with one which talks about your methodology? There are a few questions in this area about how these returns are calculated. I guess the focus of these questions is, is most of this turnover retail turnover? Is it institutional? Is it both? And how did you come up with these calculations in terms of looking at the flows and calculating these returns?

Bogle: Well, first it is very hard to separate out institutional turnover, the huge turnover where people are speculating on, for example, the SPDRs. Investment adviser turnover, how big is that? How much is individual turnover by those who intend to invest and that other component of individual behavior, which is those that intend to speculate. I don't know anybody that has unscrambled that egg. I am not privy to Vanguard data on this point.

I think even more important would be the data that someone like Barclays could provide. They are, of course, the largest firm, the most dominant firm in this business with the broadest base of business. So we are just going to have to ask them how they would divide this up. I did have a conversation with a representative of Barclays three or four years ago, and I was making the same point I am making this morning. He said, “Well, that just is not right. Seventy percent of our investors are long-term investors.” And I said, “How do you define long-term?” And he said, “Six months to a year and a half.” Well, that is not my idea of a long-term investor. That is just another example of the difficulty of getting through. It is a matter of definition.

Now, as to the methodology, we don’t do these ourselves. These are Morningstar data. My understanding of how that data is compiled, and I take some comfort by the way, in its consistency from one group to the other—which suggests that there are not a lot of problems with the data. Although I’m the first one to state and underscore that all data has problems. When you see really consistent data like this, however, it’s an eye-opener. It may not be precise, but it’s got to be giving us an indication of what we know to be true.

One of my rules has always been, take a look at some numbers and if it flies in the face of your intuition, do the numbers over and over and over again. But if the numbers confirm your intuition―which is essentially that ETF shareholders and mutual fund shareholders generally look back at past performance and buy the funds that have done well―it is sort of performance-chasing…

We know that happens. We can’t measure it with precision.

Now when you get funds with a lot of daily cash flow in and out―I’m sure real estate REITs are a good example of that, and I’m sure the SPDR is a very, very good example of that―I don’t see how we can be precise in these returns. What you do is take monthly cash flows and compare them with the price of the fund, the average price of the fund during the month, then you figure out eventually how many investor dollars earn what returns over time. Is that way of aggregating the data precise? No, it is not.

But I’m persuaded in the absence of compelling evidence on the other side that these data are telling us something that is worth knowing. And it suggests that mutual fund trading is about as valuable as trading individual stocks, which is to say, not valuable at all, and harmful to your returns.

Wiandt: Every year we hear from active managers that “this is the year of active management.” Do you believe that there are environments that are more favorable to active management than passive management and index investing? And if so, what do those times look like?

Bogle: There is no way that active managers can possibly have an advantage no matter what the circumstances are. Just think about this: Almost 75% almost of all stocks are owned by institutional investors now, and they are basically, by and large, professional investors. They are pension fund investors. They are pension money managers, they are pension trustees I should say, pension money managers, mutual fund managers, which also manage pension funds and endowment funds. And that’s 75% of all stocks, and only 75% of all stocks. It is just not possible that they can be taking the individual investor on the other side— the remaining part of the market—to the cleaners with every trade. There is no evidence of that.

So what we find is that institutional investors and individual investors basically each capture the market return and they each capture the market—and together they each capture the total market return. That is inevitable. And that’s before cost. So when you take out costs, which are high, you end up explaining almost all the reasons that active managers cannot and do not beat the funds, beat the market itself. It is just statistically, mathematically, tautologically impossible.

Wiandt: How do you see the Barclays-Black Rock merger affecting the investment landscape? What do you view as the implications of that merger?

Bogle: Well, that’s a good question. I have a couple of observations. First, they paid a pretty good-sized price. I think since Barclays kept 20% of the company, the price comes out to be something like $17 billion or $18 billion. That’s a lot of money to pay for a fairly low-margin business. Second, ultimately, I think they are going to have to reduce the cost of the funds, which will make it less attractive as an investment—because they are just a very high-cost outfit, compared to the low-cost provider, which is always Vanguard.

iShares has an average expense ratio of 41 basis points. And those are the ETFs run by Barclays. Vanguard has an average expense ratio in its ETFs of 15 basis points. Eventually the low cost wins. That’s all there is to it. So they are going to have to worry about whether they can be able to be competitive with high prices—which can be providing them with a lot of revenues and maybe a lot of money to do marketing and a lot of money to create one new index-based ETF after another, which they seem to be doing.

I think it is going to be a hard business then to build market share. And since they are around a 50% market share now, in my experience, most firms, when they get to 50% market shares, find it much more likely for that market share to shrink than to grow.

There is also another kind of a subtle thing, and I don’t mean to be unkind at all to BlackRock, but they have a real problem with active management. There is no question they must be interested in index funds because they are indexed and not actively managed. We took a look at 100 funds. They have 100 closed-end bond funds and we took a look at them last year, and 99 of them—you know, the bond market went up 5%—99 of them had negative returns. Fifty-four of them had negative returns of over 20%, including 24 of the Black-Rock-managed bond funds that had negative returns of 30%–60% last year.

I mean you’ve got to be struggling with the business when active management is producing those kinds of returns on their bond funds, their area of expertise. So I wish them well. I don’t particularly want to be in a position of criticizing them. But with their record last year, I’m sure they are every bit as disappointed and surprised as I am. I would think, to them, indexing looks like a pretty darn good business.

Wiandt: What do you think the impact of all these leveraged ETFs and all the trading activity that you outlined is? Do you think that all that trading activity and the size of ETF trading—which some days is over 40% of trading in the market—is making for more volatile markets, is actually affecting what is going on in stock markets?

Bogle: Well, I struggle a little bit with that. I’m not sure enough of the data. For example, when we say that SPDR has 10,000% turnover, if you have a buy and a sell at the same time or almost at the same time of, say, 100,000 shares of the SPDR, that’s a volume number that is counted but doesn’t result in any stock changing hands. You are just offsetting the buyer against the seller. So I haven’t been able to cut through that fog. You know, the people that are running those businesses, I think, have some kind of an obligation to report exactly how much trading goes on. And, beyond my expertise, they may actually be doing that. I just don’t know that. It is certainly something we should know.

But in general, I looked at index fund trading, oh, a few years back before these ETFs got so big, maybe three or four years ago. And index fund trading counted for about 0.4% of all securities trading on the various companies—General Electric, Microsoft and companies like that. So 0.4% can’t be looked at as something that is driving the mare here. It’s got to be smaller. It is something that ought to be investigated. But the evidence I have so far is that you can’t really place the responsibility for market volatility on index funds. Although the growth of ETFs in the last few years may have changed that conclusion.

Wiandt: We have a couple of macroeconomic-focused questions. So I will ask those. The term “systematic risk” has become a scare tactic that the government uses to justify bailouts and defraud taxpayers. What is your view of systematic risk? What is your view of the bailout and how the government has reacted to the financial crisis?

Bogle: Well, I think it is a little over the top for me to say that the government is defrauding taxpayers. I don’t know quite the context to put that in. I would strike that from anything I could possibly respond to. I just don’t believe it is true. The more relevant question is, I suppose, that when we had this enormous risk to the financial sector of the economy, primarily—we will talk about that first.

The federal government had to do something. And I think what they have done is moving in the right direction, and that is, these banks were out of liquidity. They had created banks and investment banks together. And insurance companies we now know too were part of it, including AIG, American International Group, which was probably the worst of the bunch—doing all kinds of investment… engaging in all kinds of speculative activities that led to the market meltdown we had and where credit actually froze.

And all developed economies operate on free credit. When the credit markets close down, the government can’t just say, “Too bad.” Almost every small business, many individuals, we all depend on credit one way or the other for maybe just a short time, maybe a longer time. So the government had to take action. And I think they took the right action. I think they took the right action in approximately the right dimension.

Although it’s interesting that the actions they have taken have really … they said (a) and the actions turned out to be (b). So if we talk about the troubled asset repurchase program, so-called “TARP,” —I call it the toxic asset repurchase program—that was passed by the Congress under great, great pressure on October 15. It became a campaign issue, you may recall. And they still haven’t made their first purchase of a troubled asset all this time later. What they did, despite the obvious intent of Congress but maybe not the words, is funded the equity capital positions of banks rather than buying the troubled assets.

I’m not sure how easy it is going to be, even with this new public-private investment partnership—the PPIP—how easy it is going to be for us to do trading or have liquidity among these troubled assets. Because as I understand it, bank A is very reluctant to sell one of its toxic assets at, say, 25 cents on the dollar because they’ve got a whole portfolio of toxic assets. And they are scared to death they are going to have to mark them all to 25 cents.

My understanding of what’s going on in the financial economy out there is that 25 cents, give or take, may even be a little bit high. It is roughly what these toxic assets are going to prove to be worth, or at least most of them are going to prove to be worth. So it’s going to be very hard to get them paid off. It is going to take a lot of time. But, obviously, we eventually have to reverse this tremendous leveraging. We have to de-leverage our financial economy—to say nothing of our individuals who have heavy credit card debt, enormous mortgage debt. And there is a decent amount of corporate debt, although not nearly that excessive out there, too.

I mean, debt in our economy, I think, used to run around 60% of our gross domestic product. I believe it got up to around 135% or 140% of late. So we have to do the de-leveraging. The government had to play a role in maintaining liquidity in the system. So, while I can’t defend the exact way they did it—I don’t think anybody knows exactly how to do it—I would defend the policy that calls for government intervention.

Wiandt: We have a lot of questions about ETFs. There are a couple of lines of questions. One basic line is, are ETFs a good investment for a buy-and-hold investor? If someone buys an ETF and holds it for a long time, is it a good investment? Is it potentially a better investment than a traditional mutual fund structure?

Bogle: Well, the answer to that is yes. Unequivocally, it’s a better investment than a traditional mutual fund. Is it better than a classic mutual fund that is indexed? Or to put it another way, is the SPDR a better bet than the Vanguard 500 Index bought directly from Vanguard? That all depends, like everything else in this world—I don’t see that there is a particular, in the abstract, a particular advantage one way or the other. I don’t think the SPDR is necessarily better. Its cost might be a little bit lower than, say, a brokerage commission. The Vanguard 500 Index’s cost is a hair higher, but there is no commission.

I believe, by the way, that the tax efficiency of the SPDR, to the extent that it exists, is going to be indifferent from the standard S&P 500 Index Fund of Vanguard. We have been able to manage that fund with almost no realized gains. Particularly with the market of recent years, we’ve had plenty of high cost of stock in that index fund. Now, when you start to fine-tune it a little bit for an investor accumulating money, it’s absurd to buy the exchange-traded fund because you have to pay a commission every time you buy it—when you reinvest dividends, all those kinds of things—where that is done automatically for you at a known asset value in the 500 index fund.

So for the periodic investor or the retirement plan investor, it would seem to me, just on the mathematics involved, and assuming the performance of the two is the same … I’ll come back to that in a moment … but you don’t have to worry about tax efficiency for retirement plans. I’d say the 500 index is clearly―just because of the math―the superior choice. So you can flip a coin one way or the other.

But in general, long-term investing in the right kinds of index funds, by which I mean, broad market index funds—whether it is S&P 500, total U.S. stock market, possibly the emerging markets, certainly the developed international markets, the total international as we call it—I think they are pretty even competitors. And that is a perfectly good way to invest, and you almost certainly over time substantially outpace, no matter which way you go―ETF or standard index fund―the results of actively managed funds in the same area.

Did I cover all of that, Jim?

Wiandt: I think you did a pretty good job on that one. A follow-up question is, all this trading activity that you outlined for ETFs―does that damage the long-term buy-and-hold investor who is in ETFs?

Bogle: Well, the ETF returns―a little bit surprisingly to me―come pretty close to their category returns. It doesn’t seem to be damaging. And that said, if you are, in fact, are a long-term investor, it should matter very little. Because they seem to be able to produce the return of the index, or emulate it. For the short-term investor, there are often serious variations between the net asset value of the ETF and the market price at which it is trading, particularly in the less liquid market. So you are just flipping one more coin when you get into that game and, therefore, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Wiandt: Another question on ETFs: What are the safeguards and diligence that should be taken by an investor who is looking at ETFs? What sorts of ETFs should we be looking at, and what are the issues about structure or index that we should be looking at?

Bogle: Well, I’m someone who believes in simplicity rather than complexity. And buying the index funds in any of these broad categories is, by far, the simplest way to do it. You don’t have to worry about capital gains. And there are an awful lot of funny things going on in some of the wild ETFs and a great deal of tax inefficiency and large capital gains, things like that, that don’t seem to apply to the bigger indexes, like the bigger index funds, the bigger ETF funds.

But I just go the simple route, because it is clear and nothing can get in your way. You are not in business with all these speculators. And if that starts to make a difference, you won’t be influenced by it. So I would go to the standard index fund just on the basis of simplicity. If you’ve got a tenth of a point return less—and I can’t imagine it can be much different from that, 0.01% per year—I would say that is probably a price worth paying not to have the risk.

There are also quite a few variations on this. Some of these ETFs—I don’t want to speak too strongly about it, but they verge—their concepts verge on insanity: triple leverage, up markets, down markets, new ways to beat the market—how about exchange-traded notes, which are ETFs [or ETNs]? That is basically a call or a promise to pay you the index return by an outside financial organization. And some of them have gone bankrupt, so the exchange-traded notes became worthless. You just be very careful that you are not into the note business. You can’t be sure, ever, what will happen.

So I would say, opt for simplicity. Remember Ockham’s razor. Our friend, Sir William of Ockham, says, “You know, if there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.”

Wiandt: It looks like we have got an active investor here with a question. I think you may enjoy this one. He says, “Jack, you continue to encourage individual investors to buy and hold. However, I challenge you to name one goal-oriented endeavor besides investing where an intelligent individual would select a passive approach over an active one. Can you name even one?” he says.

Bogle: I’m sorry. You are just going to have to explain the question. Name even one investor?

Wiandt: Some activity that you would want to do in life where you would choose to be passive instead of active as a way of succeeding.

Bogle: Oh, that is such a great question! And, you know, there is an answer to it. And this is why we get so messed up in the financial business. Would you go to an average doctor? No. Why would anyone go to an active doctor, to a passive doctor or not the best doctor around? The problem is, in the financial markets, they are different from any other endeavor in American life. And that is, there is a market out there and it has a certain value. And all of us together own that market.

So literally the only way to capture the market return is to own the market without cost. That cannot be done. But you can do it with a cost of as little as 0.1%, and you will, by definition, beat all these other investors who do it at a cost of maybe 2%–2.5%. There is really not any mystery about this. It is all what I’ve been willing to call or have been able to call the “relentless rules of humble arithmetic.” Get the croupiers’ take out and you capture the market return; you as a group of investors. Lave the croupiers’ take in—pay the croupier … pay Wall Street … pay the money managers … pay the brokers … pay the investment bankers … pay the investment advisers … and you get what’s left.

You know, you are sitting---you individual investor who has asked the question—you, pal, are sitting at the bottom of the food chain of investing. You know, everybody gets paid before you do. Where else is that true in American business? I don't know if it is true anywhere else at all. So, yes, unequivocally, it is different and it has to be different. And our failure to acknowledge that difference is what gets us into so much behavioral problem.

Wiandt: Is there a role for financial advisers in helping individual investors? And if there is, what is a reasonable sort of cost for a financial adviser?

Bogle: Well, I happen to believe the financial adviser serves a very useful purpose for many, certainly not all, but for many, and perhaps even most, investors. We put the stock market and the bond market and financial planning in this aura of great mystery. And if you have been around long enough, and I think I have been around long enough, although I have to be around a little bit longer—if you have been around long enough, you realize that there is not that much mystery about it. The idea is to capture the returns of the bond market and the stock market, essentially.

And that is all there is to it: to capitalize on the miracle of compounding returns and avoid the penalty of the tyranny of compounding costs. Because in the long run, the tyranny of compounding costs overwhelms the magic of compounding returns. If investors understand that much and are broadly diversified, they can really operate on their own. Now, not everybody can do that. There are motions that they don’t understand the system to begin with. They probably think they are a lot smarter than the system. They barely know a stock from a bond and don’t know what managers to trust and what managers not to trust.

So I think the investment adviser can play a very useful role, particularly in fund selection and in asset allocation and, in general, trying to help investors avoid the penalties of the behavioral kind of investing; of doing dumb things at dumb times. We may even need a financial adviser to, at times of crisis, have the courage to say to his clients or her clients, “Don’t do something. Just stand there. Stay the course.” It is generally better than moving your money around at times of crisis.

What is a fair price to pay for that? Obviously, it varies greatly. By the way, I should say much more than parenthetically, I don’t think we should rely on financial advisers to pick the best funds for us. They can pick intelligent funds. They can pick broadly diversified funds. They can pick funds with low turnover and funds with low cost. But picking funds that win is pretty much hazardous duty that nobody, now matter what their knowledge is, has really the ability to do. We rely too much on fast returns.

I think the idea is to have the adviser help you capture as much of the market returns as you can do. What’s a fair price to pay for that? Well, we talked. And in this funny, funny industry which I’m part of, we always talk about percentage turnover. I think we ought to be thinking more about dollars. And 1% is certainly not an excessive fee in terms of revenues it generates for an adviser who has got to be interested in taking care of you.

If you have $10,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 to invest, I would argue 1% might even be too low. But if you take any more of that, it is too big a hit out of your long-term compounded return. But once you get to a larger investment, I think that 1% should be scaled down somewhat—so the adviser is treated reasonably well, but not a flat percentage all the way up in the millions of dollars. I happen to believe that is just too much money for too many assets.

So the adviser has to be worthy of his hire. And then you’ve got to figure out what that worth is. And something in the range of 1% scaled down as the account grows is a reasonable place to start. I don’t think it is easy to go beyond that except to say that at some point, I would think, maybe advisers will start to work on a fee basis, like a lawyer might work, like a doctor might work, something like that. The amount of attention he gives you—the investor—is what you are paying for: his time and effort rather than an asset-based fee. That may come to develop over time.

Wiandt: An asset allocation question: One of the main reasons we use asset allocation and diversification in our portfolio is to balance the risk. So if one thing is going up, another thing is coming down. If one thing is coming down, you’ve got something else coming up. The problem is—and if you look to October you can see this—when things go bad, it seems like everything goes down. And so what can you say to that? Is there anything that people should do in that environment or do you just ride it out?

Bogle: To me, first, in general, the question is correct insofar as it applies to equities. And it’s been long said—many, many years ago, and it’s proved so true in every crisis since then—international diversification lets us down just when we need it the most. And truer words than that were never spoken. On the other hand, the fact is that bonds produce a very good countercyclical return.

I don't know exactly what they did in September. But I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks that the bond index fund went up 5% last year. That really was counter in direction, if not in amount, to the 35%, 37% decline in the U.S. stock market. Now I look at bonds as being the ultimate diversifier. I don’t look at diversification in equities [in terms of] being in different equity styles as being particularly helpful in the long run.

Look, we all know there are times when growth is doing better than value and vice versa, that large-cap is doing better than small-cap and vice versa. But they seem to come back. They seem to revert to the mean over long, long periods of time. And it’s very hard. Individual stocks, individual styles, have a very similar correlation with a stock market as a whole, a very similar correlation with one another and with the stock market as a whole—even down to the individual stock level and the style level and the manager level. So I think if you are looking for safety, the best instrument for safety is a high-grade bond portfolio, including Treasuries and high-grade corporates.

Wiandt: What are Jack’s thoughts on using inverse ETFs for short-term tactical hedges for those individuals who can’t stomach some of the rides for true long-run buy-and-hold theory? In other words, what role do these products have, if any?

Bogle: None. Did I make my position clear? No, the problem is, it is wonderful to buy a leveraged short ETF just before the market goes way down. I think to put the question in that way is to answer it. Who knows when the market is going to go way down? The time you are most likely to buy that kind of a fund is when the market has gone down. It’s a kind of inverse performance-chasing. I don’t like tricks. They require timing. They require more courage than I have. And they require a belief that you know more than the market.

In my very first book, one of my rules at the end, my principles, my 12 pillars of wisdom, was, “Never think you know more than the market. Nobody does.” Investing is putting money to work where it earns an internal rate of return: interest rates, dividend yields, earnings growth. It is not guessing what prices are going to do next. You know, we all ought to know by now that the stock market is the way we buy the returns of American business over time, the way we participate in the returns of American business over time.

But it also turns out that on any short-term basis, the stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investment. Of course it is. An inverse ETF is a bet on the market taking a certain direction and a bet that you are smart enough to do it, so you better double your bet on the way down. I don’t mean to be too tough on these kinds of funds, but I think anyone that does that is crazy. But I wish them well. I always wish them well.

Wiandt: Here is a bit of a technical question. Professor Jeremy Siegel has challenged the method of calculating the S&P 500. He believes that the calculation should be earnings-weighted as opposed to cap-weighted, capitalization-weighted by market weight. What are your thoughts on that?

Bogle: It just isn’t true. Can I make it clearer? The fact of the matter is, this issue arose earlier in the year. And by the way, the Wall Street Journal had a very powerful and accurate response from Standard & Poor’s as to why it was statistically unsound. It is just not a good statistical technique.

[The S&P response took the example of] one little company that had a great big dollar amount of earnings loss. And to think about it this way, supposing that little company, just before it announced the loss, had been bought by, let’s say, Exxon; the company was bought by Exxon. The loss would be exactly the same. It would be carried over to their balance sheet but it would be in a big company.

The index is already weighted by market cap. It is clearly weighted by dividends; each company’s dividends and each company’s aggregate earnings. When there is an aberration, you just have to live with it. Call it an aberration. Call it anything you want but don’t change the weightings of earnings because it just doesn’t make statistical sense. I’ll bet Jeremy Siegel has had second thoughts about his position, by the way.

Wiandt: Jack, are you planning to write another book, perhaps an opus of your life?

Bogle: Well, that’s a good question. I think when my life’s work is done I’m going to write the book, but I don't know when that will be. But I’m not planning it right now. As the last paragraph in “Enough” says, “One must wait until the evening to enjoy the splendor of the day.”

Wiandt: Where do you see dividend yields going forward? Conventional experts see much lower returns. What are your thoughts on this? What are your thoughts on forward market returns?

Bogle: Well, my theory, or my mathematical construct—which I’ve been using for a long, long, long time now, certainly decades—is that in the long run, market returns are 100% composed of what I call investment returns, dividend yields at time of entry into the market and the earnings growth that follows. That’s not a very complicated way to look at it. But it turns out that it is totally accurate when you look at the returns of the market over the long run.

You have this element of what I call speculative returns, which is changes in valuation. If the price earnings multiple of stocks goes from 10 times earnings to 20 times earnings, that doubling over 10 years adds 7% a year to the returns on stocks. And we actually had that. That happened twice, in the ’80s and again in the ’90s.

But it can’t happen forever. In the long run, 100% of market returns or investment returns and speculative returns come and go. But in the long run they amount to nothing. So investment returns in the future will probably drive the market. I don’t look for speculative returns to drive it up or down a great deal, certainly not by 7% a year.

Right now the dividend yield looks to me to be about 3.25%. I had it at 4% earlier this year but we had a big drop in dividends, one of the biggest cuts in dividends—around a 22% drop is forecast for the S&P 500, and I don’t see that drop is going to be repeated in the kind of economy I see. I think most of the drop is behind us. So using the current dividend yield, down 20% from last year’s, would give us around a 3.25% yield.

From this level—well, let me first say, when one spends just a moment of time on the simplicity of it, we know a lot about earnings growth. And that’s the other component of the investment return. We know that from the beginning of time, practically, corporate earnings grow at the same rate of our economy over the long term. And so if our GDP has been growing at 5%, then corporate earnings should be growing at 5% nominally. and they do.

And what is interesting about that is that they are in a very narrow channel. If you are looking at them a little bit differently, corporate earning generally account, after taxes, for 4%–8% of our gross domestic product. That is a very narrow channel and they average about 6% of GDP. So let’s assume from these depressed earnings levels, that instead of growing at 5% as the economy may grow—it may grow a little slower than that—the corporate earnings can grow at 6% or 7% from here. It is conceivable.

It’s a probability, I think, but certainly not a certainty. So if you are going to use 6%, that is a 9.25% return on stocks. Let’s assume that maybe that valuation comes down and takes a point of that return. You ought to be looking at 8%, perhaps 7% return on stocks, which is pretty good, if not very good. Because when we do the same mathematics for the bond market at today’s interest rate on a portfolio of governments and corporates roughly equally weighted at today’s interest rates—it is going to be 4.75% or 5%. So let’s call it 5% for simplicity.

If you compound over the next decade at 8% instead of 5%, you ought to be a pretty happy investor. So I’m optimistic, although I want to underscore that in these economic conditions, one has to look at not only the possibilities of what the future returns will be in the rough dimensions that I described here—but the consequences to you if they are not. And if you are too exposed to equities and things go wrong—and they can always go wrong—the stock market is a bad place for hope. You want to be conservative, even though the odds favor the stocks doing significantly better than bonds in the coming decade.

Wiandt: We have time for a couple more questions. The federal government has made a massive infusion of money into the market. What does this portend to the value of the U.S. dollar going forward, and is there anything that investors should be doing about that to protect themselves?

Bogle: Well, it should portend a rapid drop in the dollar. But the dollar is, of course, affected not only by the financial side but by the expectations of investors. So I’m not sure it’s a lead-pipe cinch that the dollar will be hugely weak. It came out about $1.17 relative to the euro all those years ago and it’s not all that far from it now. I don't know the current rate. Say maybe $1.40. I haven’t looked recently. That is not a huge change for a decade against the euro.

So predicting the dollar is like any other prediction. You can be right and you can be wrong. And if the dollar is, in fact, weak, I think everybody understands that will be great for international U.S. corporations. So it should help equity prices. I don’t think one should base an investment strategy on the fact that one thinks one knows what the dollar is going to do in the years ahead. Although I would be inclined to agree with the thrust of the question and that is, it’s hard to think that we can have a stronger dollar over the next four or five years.

Wiandt: This is another asset allocation-focused question: Given the almost unprecedented experience of 10 years with bond and equity prices—where you saw bonds really outperform equities over a very long time horizon—should investors be looking at how they do asset allocation between fixed income and equities in a different way?

Bogle: Well, it’s funny that after the previous 20 years ended in 1999 with bonds doing so much worse than stocks—although if you start at the beginning with very high interest rate yields, bonds did actually pretty well—the average return on bonds running through those years was probably about 6% or 7%. And the return on stocks was about 17% over 20 years. And everybody was saying, “Shouldn’t we have more stocks?”

And the answer is “No. You shouldn’t have more stocks.” They are selling at very high valuations and there is a lot of reversion to the mean. You know, high stock returns tend to be followed by low stock returns. Great booms are followed by great busts. Prices revert to kind-of normal valuations over time. So at this time, I don’t think that one should pay a lot of attention to what happened in the last 10 years. I think what happened in the last 10 years—particularly to the stock market, or entirely to the stock market---is very much a reversion of the mean of the excess, greatly excess return that we had in the two previous decades.

Don’t forget, as 1999 ended and 2000 began, stocks were selling at almost 40 times earnings. That can’t stay at 40 times earnings; it has to come down. Now, in this muddy situation that we have, they are probably selling about 20 times these depressed earnings. It’s hard to get a handle on that. But half as highly valued and could come down a little bit. But bond returns … people should understand very importantly about bond returns that today’s yields are the best possible approximation of what bonds will deliver in the next 10 years. Let’s call that a 5% return.

There happens to be, over time, a 91% correlation between the interest rate in which you go into the bond market at and the return that the bond market provides over the next 10 years. So we have a pretty good idea that bond returns would be about 4%–6%. You take your chances on stock returns, and if you think they are going to be much lower than that guess I gave—I suppose if you are a market timer, you should reallocate to bonds if you think stocks are going to return less than 5%. But I don’t think we know enough to do that with much confidence.

I would further say, to me, now—and I’m very conservator investor, extraordinarily conservative—that I believe your bond position should equal your age. And my bond position does equal my age. So I really had a good year last year. Sometimes it’s a blessing to be old, but only rarely.

So, I think one should look at one’s asset allocation in a certain way. Let’s say you decide, for a whole bunch of reasons, that you want to be, say 70%—you’re a younger investor—70% in stocks and 30% in bonds. If you think you can do some forecasting about the direction of the bond or stock market, particularly the stock market, and you think it is going to be down, don’t get out of stocks at 70%, maybe go to 60%. Don’t go below 50%—call it 20 percentage points below your allocation—any more than you should never go above that.

I don’t think that is a good strategy. But it is a much better strategy than thinking, “I’m either in the market or I’m out of it.” Those wholesale changes in equity ratio I think are going to destroy the retirement funds of countless investors that follow it.

Wiandt: We are moving toward wrapping up now. I just have a couple of things to note. We have all the slides up and a recording of the webinar up on the Web site, IndexUniverse.com.

With that, I just really want to thank you, Mr. Bogle, for taking the time with all the investors here. I think it was outstanding. And I’m sure that all the Bogleheads out there really enjoyed it. And thanks to all of you for attending as well.

Bogle: Well, I enjoyed being with all of you. I hope you will forgive my bluntness, but any of you who know me realize it is probably a little late to give up on that. Have a great day everybody.

Company Description

Allied World Assurance Company Holdings, Ltd, provides innovative property, casualty and specialty insurance and reinsurance solutions through its subsidiaries. The global company has offices in Bermuda, the United States and Europe.

Higher Earnings Forecasts

The company is seeing bullish estimates from Wall Street ahead of its first-quarter report. Earnings forecasts for the full year are at $7.46 per share, up 4 cents from last month and 24 cents higher than the projections of 2 months ago.

Allied World is scheduled to report on May 7.

Quarterly Results Reflect Growth

The company's fourth-quarter results included earnings per share that came in 52% ahead of the consensus estimate. Allied World's earnings have, on average, outpaced analysts' expectations by 20% over the past 4 consecutive quarters.

President and Chief Executive Officer Scott Carmilani commented, "Allied World has emerged from 2008 as an even stronger company despite it being a very difficult year for insurance companies and the financial sector as a whole. While not immune to the impact of the catastrophe losses for the year, we still managed to generate a very impressive 20.6% operating ROE for 2008 and ended the year with over US$2.4 billion in shareholders' equity, up 8% from year end 2007. In the fourth quarter, we achieved record operating income driven by strong investment income, favorable reserve development and a meaningful contribution from our recently acquired Darwin business."

Favorable Industry Comparisons Include Solid Income

The company offers a current return on equity (ROE) of 19%, beating the industry average of 11%. Its net profit margin of 16% is well above the industry average of 9%. Allied World's dividend yield of 2% also tops the industry average. Zacks Investment Research

One of the reasons this is so outrageous is that the promise of such bonuses was in fact one of the very factors that caused our current problems, creating incentives for managers of AIG to get out of solid insurance underwriting and into hedge fund gambling. If anyone had supposed that AIG had "learned its lesson", this report seemed to dash that hope against the wall like a plate of china.

Some may argue that AIG's hands were tied by contracts the company offered employees in the spring of 2008 promising that 2008 bonuses would be 100% of 2007 bonuses. Or that the inability of the Treasury Secretary to override these bonuses was cemented by the following clause in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law on February 17:

The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.

Fox News blamed the above de facto AIG exemption on Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), suggesting a possible connection to the fact that Dodd was the largest single recipient of 2008 campaign donations from AIG. But Jane Hamsher documents that the words above were inserted after the bill left the senate and went to conference committee. Hamsher proposes instead that pressure from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Head Larry Summers played a role in those words' appearance in the final bill.

I have yet to find a clear account with actual names of the representatives and senators who thought prohibiting restrictions on bonuses promised before February 11 was a good idea. But somebody put that clause in, and the claim that the legislators all are shocked-- shocked-- to find this is part of what they voted for is, if nothing else, Exhibit 9,247 for the case that legislation needs to be sufficiently short that everyone can be expected to read it.

But more shocking yet, at least if we measure these things in dollars and cents, is the amount of taxpayer funds that have gone to compensate AIG's counterparties for bets those counterparties never should have been allowed to make.

Source: Capital Chronicls

On Sunday Larry Summers offered this explanation for the bonuses:

We are a country of law. There are contracts.... Binding contracts were entered into long before the government put any money into AIG. We're not a country where contracts just get abrogated willy-nilly.

But here's the point. AIG may have entered into contracts with its managers and its counterparties, but the U.S. taxpayers did not. A precondition for infusion of taxpayer funds has to be sufficient restructuring of pre-existing commitments to ensure that any new funds delivered achieve their purpose rather than simply prolong the problem.

If Geithner and Summers feel they lack the legal authority to ensure that kind of constructive receivership status for recipients of bailout dollars, then they should have delivered proposed legislation to Congress providing such authority on day one.

Or, given that we missed that deadline, maybe they'd consider giving us a plan that works tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: macroeconomics, economics, credit default swaps bailouts, AIG

Hungary's biggest problem at the moment is how on earth to stay worried about a dropping Forint while at the same time realizing that the country is headed towards the worst recession in several decades. As some readers will remember the reason that the Forint today is subjected to full force of currency punters is to be found one year ago. Back in February, Hungary as well as other emerging markets opted to loosen their pegs towards the USD, the Euro or both in an attempt to "allow" the currency to appreciate to quell the inflation everybody was so focused on at the time

The Hungarian forint tumbled to a record low against the euro as risk aversion spread and concern deepened the economic slowdown will worsen. The forint extended this year’s decline to 11.4 percent, the second-biggest drop among emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg, as Hungary heads towards its worst recession in 15 years. The country was the first European Union member to seek international aid to avert a default last year, prompting a 20 billion-euro ($26 billion) emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union.

“The forint is being dragged down by negative regional news,” said Nigel Rendell, senior emerging-markets strategist at RBC Capital Markets in London. “The weakening of the Russian ruble and the bank nationalization in Kazakhstan are weighing on the markets. They “may test the resolve of the central bank in Hungary” and in Russia, he said.

The forint dropped as much as 1.5 percent to 300.37 against the euro and was at 299.60 at 12:54 p.m. in Budapest. It earlier broke through the key 300 per euro level, where option barriers were set, according to BNP Paribas. The level at which the forint is trading is of “extreme concern,” Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said yesterday after a meeting with central bank President Andras Simor.

As we can see from the added graphics, the Forint has indeed taken a solid beating and in light of the fact that Hungary still have those Swiss denominated mortgages makes the depreciating currency sheet poison.

What happens next is indeed a good question. According to Danske Bank the Eur/huf may very well go beyond the 300 mark. Meanwhile, the daily plight of the economy muddles along with S&P announcing the downgrade to BBB of one of Hungary biggest insurance companies Generali Providencia. And the reason ... well because the investment portfolio of the company is heavily exposed to Hungary's sovereign risk of course, and speaking of which; financing conditions remain rather difficult for the the Hungarian government agency. Earlier today (Tuesday), the government agency received 37.8 billion HUF worth of bids for a pool of 40 billion HUF issuance of 3 month t-bills; yields were 26bps higher than for a corresponding auction a week ago.

And in Russia ...

If 2009 looks set to be a year to regret for the global economy it may be the year to forget for Russia. As Edward pointed out recently, the manufacturing sector in Eastern Europe has been jolted into near depression territory. However, the problem for Russia and by derivative for the rest of us, given the size of the Russian economy, may be great indeed. One particular thing which caught my eye recently was for example a small snippet from the Economist Intelligence Unit that laid out the disturbing facts (hat tip: AFOE). The EIU initiates its argument by noting that in mid 2008 Russia still had enough reserves (US$600bn) to cover the total sum of foreign debt (US$527.1bn) and although the debt was primarily held by companies the EIU makes the valid that;

(...) whereas the bulk of the debt was the responsibility of Russian companies and financial institutions, Russia’s huge commodity exports and its widening current-account surplus acted as an implicit guarantee for creditors (...)

Now, one key part of this guarantee was of course oil price of 100 usd a baril and thus the boost this gave the Russian external balance.

The rest, as they say, is history. There was a while when Russia stood tall and spent the reserves to defend the hitherto band of the Rouble but that quickly was abandoned for a policy of deliberate devaluations to restore competitiveness as the external balance heads towards deficit. So far the Rouble has lost more than 30% of its value against the USD and the central bank has expanding the trading range of the currency no less than 20 times since November. This sharp correction in the Rouble, although perhaps necessary to restore competitiveness, has not come without a cost since most of the before mentioned debt is denominated in foreign currency (USD and Euros) naturally making the liabilities for Russian companies increasingly unsustainable. In the context of hard currency reserves to cover increasingly hard currency liabilities the following point by the EIU is important;

State handouts cannot continue indefinitely, not least because reserves no longer cover total foreign liabilities: on the basis total debt was US$540bn at the end of September 2008, and that US$73bn was repaid in the fourth quarter, total debt is now US$467bn and private-sector debt US$425bn. Russia entered the crisis with the world’s third largest cache of central bank reserves, but it has been dwindling at an accelerating pace. By mid-January, reserves had declined to just below US$400bn, meaning that more than a third of the total was spent over the past five months.

So, once again reserves are less than the total stock of foreign liabilities and the mismatch does not seem set to get smaller as we progress into 2009. As Brad Setser points out this comes against a backdrop of a forecast by Danske Bank that Russia may contract a full 3% in 2009. Edward carries a much fuller analysis of over at GEM which focuses on a wide array of recent Russian data points; I can tell you that it is not pretty.

Emerging Markets; Decoupling or not?

In a more general light I would like to finish this small pot boiler with a point made by Brad Setser recently that, as the global recession tightens, we cannot look to emerging economies for good news. One part of this is naturally derived from the plight of Russia and the CEE, but also as Brad Setser points Asia is struggling too. Most significant in this regard is clearly the mounting evidence that China is headed down the roller coaster too. Has anybody really considered what will happen when they announce that the Yuan will be going down, not up, agains the USD. Good luck Geithner!

More specifically, Brad elaborates on the Asian situation in a recent very informative writ. It is a wonderful story really, building on top notch punditry by the Economist, about reliance on foreign demand and the connection between domestic investment and capacity elsewhere. The bottom line is that Asia needs to find a new way to grow and thus a new way to steer their economies; the question is of course which of these economies that can actually pull it off. The most recent significant data print came from South Korea's external balance in January; exports are down 47%(!) and as Macro Man succintly puts it;

So the theme of collapsing global trade looks to be alive and well.

Alive and well indeed, alive and well indeed; and with 2009 set to become a real bone cruncher all economies reliant on exports to grow are set to suffer, suffer a lot.

It is funny to think about all this in the context of the (in)famous discussion about de-coupling. The original discourse was cast in the light of a veritable switch-of-batons as the US economy slowed and thus how the rest of the world would aid to propel the global economy to a constant growth rate even as the US economy faltered. This was clearly not possible. Now it remains to be seen whether some economies can decouple not to the extent to contribute to a global recovery but to avoid a sharp recession in their own domestic economies.

There's no mistaking that the global financial crisis has found its way to India's shores at a time when the country is in no shape to weather it. Add to this the Satyam Computers (SAY) debacle and the recovery picture becomes all the more obscure.

Also, with banks in the USA and Europe struggling to survive, outsourcing is less likely to be a dominant theme going forward. It is expected that the BPOs may cut their dollar revenue forecasts due to a downturn in the U.S. market, which contributes more than half their revenue. These companies have already said that customers were delaying decisions on new projects in the tough global environment.

Additionally, German software maker SAP (SAP) warned that its sales had dropped and has toned down its guidance going forward as companies curtailed business software spending. This is expected to negatively affect the Indian BPOs with increasing revenue dependence in Europe.

The Impact of a Weakening Financial Services Sector

Among the major players in the IT Services sector, the percentage of total revenues derived from the financial services vertical amounts to approx. 46% for Cognizant (CTSH, Hold), 45% for Genpact (G), 43% for Tata Consultancy Services (or TCS), 35% for Infosys (INFY, Hold) and 25% for Wipro (WIT, Hold). Given that well over half of this exposure (more for the application outsourcing firms and less for the BPO firms) can come from "discretionary" software development and other projects, the Street has been justifiably concerned about the impact of even tighter bank IT budgets in 2009.

The Indian vendors themselves have attempted to soften these Street concerns by disclosing the portion of this revenue mix derived from the more volatile investment banking sector compared to the more secure insurance or commercial banking sectors, or (as in the case of Cognizant) indicating that its largest bank clients continue to spend while its smaller clients may be more vulnerable. This sub-sector distinction, while useful, has lost some value of late as the contagion seems to have spread to every corner of the financial services vertical.

While Infosys, Cognizant, TCS, Wipro and most other Indian vendors have been quite candid about the impact of the weakening financial services sector (citing lengthening sales cycles, delays in project ramps, consolidation of vendors and/or the loss of pricing power), most Indian firms had actually posted relatively strong sequential growth rates in their financial services verticals up until the last quarter in CY2008. However, the tone has since markedly changed from "stable" to "challenging."

Infosys recently reported fiscal Q3:FY09 results slightly below the low-end of its guidance and approximately in line with buy-side expectations. Infosys posted a sequential revenue decline of 4% to $1.17 billion, with constant currency sequential growth of 1% offset by a 5% currency hit. According to Infosys, the environment remains challenging and visibility into fiscal 2010 (ended March 2010) will be limited until its clients confirm their 2009 IT budgets, which Infosys is expecting in mid-February. The midpoint of the new March quarter revenue guidance implies another sequential revenue decline of 2%.

Similarly, TCS reported a sequential revenue decline of 6% in its December quarter and sequential constant currency growth of 1%, similar to Infosys. Overall, the TCS results suggest that volumes may have stabilized somewhat, but the company did not imply that growth would accelerate anytime soon. Keep in mind the major impact of the weak new bookings and delayed project ramps experienced in 2008 won't show up until Q1 or Q2:2009.

Needless to say, most investors are now are weighing how the calamity in the financial services vertical will affect 2009 results. Investors are well aware that the March 2008 shock from the collapse of Bear Stearns caused several pending Indian application and business process outsourcing deal awards to get delayed, and there is no reason to believe that the September 2008 shock won't have the same effect.

OPPORTUNITIES

There is, however, a silver lining in the dark clouds. Some of the companies have indicated that the level of client discussions is still healthy, even though these discussions are converting to signed deals at a much slower clip. It also appears that deal activity in continental Europe and in the local Indian market is healthy, although neither region represents a material portion of the revenue mix for most of the Indian outsourcers.

It is also rumored that government-owned insurer AIG (AIG) has issued a RFP ["request for proposal"] for a multi-billion dollar IT and back-office outsourcing deal in an effort to cut costs. It is estimated that new deal awards in the month of October were $15 billion, exceeding the level of new contract awards for the entire September quarter. Note, however, that this total is down 12% from October 2007, and a full $2.5 billion of it stems from the TCS-Citigroup (C) deal and many of the deal awards were for network and IT infrastructure outsourcing that the Indian vendors often don't compete on.

The consensus view is that the current sluggishness will last at least a few more quarters, and that Q2:2009 or Q3:2009 will be the recovery quarter with the industry fully back on track in 2010. The fact remains that visibility is so low that no one really knows when companies will feel comfortable enough to move forward with strategic offshore outsourcing decisions. The new bookings recovery was initially pegged by the Indian vendors for Q4:2008 and then it was pushed to Q2:2009. The CEO of TCS indicated recently that a Q3:2009 recovery is more likely.

Also, the management of Infosys indicated recently that this year it is looking for growth for the IT industry at somewhere in the region of 15%, compared to 30% last year. However, Infosys also reiterated that it would hire the 25,000 people it has targeted for this year and that there are no plans to cut headcount. Although the company has seen delays in orders, there has been no change in its third quarter guidance so far.

WEAKNESSES

Companies in the IT Services sector, particularly the India-based ones, are still reeling from the aftershocks of one of he biggest financial scandals perpetrated by Satyam Computer (SAY, Sell). While much has been written (and even more verbalized) of the longer-term impact this may have on the industry as a whole, it appears that the companies in the sector have withstood the initial impact of the scandal.

The longer-term outcome, however, is not so clear. The Satyam stigma is clearly impacting other leading companies in the sector, mostly by default, and questions are already arising whether India may continue to be the favored destination for IT outsourcing. China, with less than 10% share of global IT spending and clearly lagging India in IT services outsourcing, is rearing its head to capitalize from the Satyam fallout, and large multinationals -- soured by the Satyam mess -- may start looking at non-India based outsourcers to fill its needs. Although it is too early to speculate, the developing trend does not bode well for Indian outsourcers.

The current feedback from Indian and U.S.-based outsourcing companies are somewhat tempered, with most sources saying that things are still getting worse. Many existing clients of these IT Services firms are still reducing their headcount and looking to cut back on their offshore IT spending. New deals and clients are extremely tough to come by given the economic uncertainty.

While existing projects are still not being canceled, new deal activity has slowed dramatically. Infosys indicated recently that many clients are still pushing the company to reduce its delivery costs so as to lower clients' total offshore IT spend. The fact that most Indian vendors have very large (30%-50%) exposure to the financial services sector doesn't help, and some vendors have high exposure to clients that are reducing headcount materially. Many of the outsourcing advisory firms (which advise large enterprises on their deals with the offshore and domestic outsourcing vendors) are also reducing headcount and looking for strategic combinations. All of these do not point to a bullish scenario.

CONCLUSION

We are supportive of a long-term bull case on Infosys (INFY), Cognizant (CTSH) and the shares of the other Indian outsourcing vendors. However, the prevailing argument leans towards a dismal scenario for a few more quarters, with a cou