ETF Monkey

With my latest article on dividend-growth ETFs , I have now covered a total of 24 ETFs in the ETF Monkey Focus series on Seeking Alpha. For an updated list of all 24 ETFs and their related articles, feel free to take a look at the handy index I provide right here on my blog. If you like my work, be sure to follow me on Twitter , Facebook , and/or Google+ to receive the latest updates as they happen.

It is certainly an interesting world that we live in. As some of my readers know, I am a contributor on the Seeking Alpha website. As such, I receive daily emails featuring the top articles being featured for the day. One of the titles in particular jumped out at me this morning. The title was: Did Trump Just Kill The Trump Trade? For whatever reason, it stopped me in my tracks, pondering the question of how many articles I have seen attempting to make more and more use of Trump's name in the title. Now, not all of them are attention-grabbing in nature. Some flow very naturally, like another one I recently came across: Trump's Comments Send The Dollar Reeling . OK, reasonable enough. But several others along the way have struck me as nothing more than blatant attempts to work Trump's name into the title. In a spirit of full disclosure, I did it myself on two articles I wrote this past November;  Trump's Deplorable Effects On The ETF Monkey Portfolios and The T

As 2016 drew to a close, I was busily working both on encouraging millennials to make investing their New Year's Resolution, as well as on the ETF Monkey Focus series of articles. To-date, I have reviewed no less than 21 ETFs in this series, all of them with expense ratios of .19% or less. I hope to continue adding to this series on approximately a weekly basis until I have reviewed somewhere in the area of 100 ETFs. Along the way, however, a couple of readers asked me to do a quick article suggesting some great ETFs to own going into 2017. I thought I would oblige, so spent a little time doing some research. Here is the resulting article . Readers must be loving it. Although, as I write this, the article has only been online for 11 days, it is already my top-read article of the last year. The last year ! Thanks to every one of my readers! ----------- Authors Note: If you like my work, I would be profoundly grateful if you would take a minute to follow

A week or so ago, as I sat eating my delicious bowl of corn flakes, I recall a smile spreading across my face. You see, I tend to watch CNBC over breakfast. That particular morning, one of their analysts was featuring the fact that that Dow had risen spectacularly following Donald Trump becoming President-elect on November 8, 2016. But that wasn't what made me smile. The analyst continued to explain that the Dow is a price-weighted index, and thus the stocks with a higher share price move the average more. Long story short, he featured that one stock was responsible for something like 400 of the 1,600 or so points that the Dow had risen. That stock? The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE: GS ), up a mind-boggling 31.6% from November 8 through December 30! And my smile? Because, during the election, I remember consistently hearing the refrain that a Hillary Clinton victory would have been too much of a win for . . . wait for it . . . Goldman Sachs ! As Alanis Morissette

A quick thought for today. Regular readers will know that, in general, I am in favor of relatively simple portfolios, constructed with low-cost, quality ETFs. I just completed building The ETF Monkey Millennial Model Portfolio for Seeking Alpha. This portfolio is comprised of 7 ETFs, covering U.S. stocks, foreign stocks, REITS and bonds. I received this comment from a reader: The proposed portfolio is overly complicated. Why don't you simplify the above to 90% VT + 10% AGG or 90% VTI + 10% AGG? Slicing and dicing may look cool. But it promotes more rebalancing which creates more trading and thus more costs. While I am in favor of simple portfolios, there are on occasions valid reasons to use two (or three) ETFs when it could be argued that one would do. Let me give a simple example from this portfolio. Instead of using the Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US ETF (VEU) for the portion of the portfolio dedicated to foreign stocks, I used a combination of the Vanguard FTSE Deve