Why does BlackRock's XIN page show XIN as having only 1 holding?
EFA must be bought and sold in US dollars. XIN allows people to buy and sell EFA in Canadian dollars without exposing their investment to unpredictable swings in the USD/CAD ratio.  This is what's known as a currency-hedged instrument. Now, why the chart sums up to over 100% is anyone's guess.  Presumably it's the result of a couple hundred rounding errors from all the components.  If you view their most recent report, it also sums up to over 100%, but at least the EFA component is (sensibly) under 100%. P.S. I'm not seeing where it says there's only one holding.  There's the primary holding, plus over 100 other cash holdings to effect the currency-hedging. "On BlackRock's XIN page under Key Facts it says the number of holdings as 1. Looking at the top 10 holdings shows EFA as the number 1 holding with a 101% weighting. XIN is ""iShares MSCI EAFE Index ETF (CAD-Hedged)"", so it takes the underlying component and hedges it to CAD.  The underlying component is an ETF itself, EFA, so they only need to hold that one component (since that is the MSCI EAFE Index ETF). How is it possible to hold over 100%? Take a look at the full list of holdings.  While EFA is the only underlying security (e.g. ETF, Stock, Bond, et.c), the remaining holdings (looks to be 133 remaining holdings) are cash positions.  Some of those positions are negative for hedge purposes.  Because of this, the total value of the portfolio is less than the position of EFA itself (since total value is EFA plus a bunch of negative entries); because the total value is less than EFA itself, EFA has a > 100% weighting."
"Why does the yield go up if the country is economically unstable? The yield will rise when instability increases because the risk of default increases.  If the case of Greece, the instability of government finances resulted in a 50% ""haircut"" for bond holders in 2011.  In other words, bond holders suffered a 50% write down in the nominal value of their bonds.  This means that holding these bonds until maturity will mean they will only receive half of the original nominal value of the bond, and that is assuming no further write downs occur. Why does selling a bond drive up the yield? Significant selling of bonds means that sellers are worried about future prospects.  Sellers will outnumber buyers, so sellers will have to reduce their offer price in order to attract new buyers. So if you think Greece is not going to default as it's highly likely a country would completely default, wouldn't it make sense to hold onto the bonds? If you think that it is highly unlikely that Greece will default and the prices and yields are attractive, then Greek bonds may look like an attractive investment. However, keep in mind the fate of bond holders in 2011.  They were attracted to Greek bonds by the price and yield, but they suffered a 50% haircut." Is that an FHA loan you have? And you're wanting to do one of those low cost FHA re-fi's, right? The answer is that in between when you first got that loan and now, the government's changed the rules on PMI for FHA loans. It more than doubled the amount of monthly PMI you have to pay.  The new rates, efective April 18th, 2011, as as follows: It used to be 0.50% per year for the 30 year. So that's why the PMI would go up.  There is another rule in play too, specific to that no-cost FHA refi -- the government requires that the combined (principal+interest+pmi) monthly payment after the refi is at least 4% lower than the current payment. Note that the no-cost refi does not require a new appraisal.  Some options present themselves, but only if you can show some equity in a appraisal: 1) if an appraisal shows at least 10% equity, you can go refi to a standard mortgage. You might even be able to find one that doesn't require PMI at that level. If you have 20% equity, you're golden -- no pmi. 2) See what the monthly payment will be if you refi to the 15 year FHA mortgage. Between the much lower PMI, and the much lower interest rates (15 year is usually about 0.75% less than a 30 year), it might not be much more than what you're paying now. And you'd save a huge amount of money over time, and get out from that PMI much earlier (it stops when your principal drops below 80% of the loan amount). This would require that reappraisal. "You're missing the point here. The goal of ratings firms is **not** to accurately price debt. That's the market's job. The goal of ratings companies is to evaluate the ability of the company to service their debt instrument, much like how the goal of a public accounting firm is to assure that a company's financial statements follow GAAP.  The article implicitly makes the assertion that Aaa rated securities have pretty low default rates; it's mainly only the area of CDO backed securities that there's a large disconnect between the rating and default risk. While this does raise questions about the worthiness of these ratings and the way they went about modeling and rationalizing them, it hardly suggests that they are ""wrong over 50% of the time.""  As a side note, why not make it against the law for mutual funds to have rules that allow them to only hold Aaa rated securities? These funds that demand high credit ratings are only contributing to the conflict of interest by essentially ""asking for it.""" "That article is over a year old and at the tail end of the largest recession in 50 years. It is based on Census data, but since they don't say which data it is not clear where they got their information. Do you have anything from this past moth or so?  Looking at the Census website, [here is the Census page with data](http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/), and if you open the top link titled ""Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent  •All Races [XLS - 45k]"" you'll see that there is a slight blip in income level but as of 2010 almost every quintile is wthin $1000/yr of an all time high. Feel free to browse and analyze their datasets, but it does not look bad.  So let's find more recent data: BLS tracks such items, such as the [National Compensation Survey](http://www.bls.gov/ncs/tables.htm) , the [Labor Force Statistics](http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswktabs.htm) and the [CUrrent Population Survey](http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm#weekearn), among others. I am too tired to dig through this. I already posted the Census data, and it is old and shows signs on increase, and plenty from BLS that I have dug up in other posts shows that real income most definitley has not declined for *decades*. At worst people have incomes similar to 2005, and it seems most quintiles are back to an all time high for real compensation." "As an exercise, I want to give this a shot.  I'm not involved in a firm that cares about liquidity so all this stuff is outside my purview.  As I understand it, it goes something like this: buy side fund puts an order to the market as a whole (all or most possibly exchanges).  HFTs see that order hit the first exchange but have connectivity to exchanges further down the pipe that is faster than the buy side fund.  They immediately send their own order in, which reaches exchanges and executes before the buy side fund's order can.  They immediately put up an ask, and buy side fund's order hits that ask and is filled (I guess I'm assuming the order was a market order from the beginning).  This is in effect the HFT front running the buy side fund.    Is this accurate?  Even if true, whether I have a genuine issue with this... I'm not sure.  Has anyone on the ""pro-HFT"" side written a solid rebuttal to Lewis and Katsuyama that has solid research behind it?" USB is the ticker for US Bancorp. The numbers to me look like their prediction of the return for the day, I could be wrong but I think that's what it is. In your other question about these funds you quoted two very different yields for them. That pretty clearly says they are NOT tracking the same index. I think what he was confused about is why EV is used if a company like Apple is going to have an EV much less than its market cap. His point was, if EV was the only way to measure the value of a firm, a company that hordes cash like APPL should be more valuable than its EV indicates.   I think he failed to take into account that hording cash means the company isn't reinvesting in itself like it should, and therefore, at the time of a transaction, when the cash exits the balance sheet, you get significantly less in terms of remaining value.   I can definitely see why people might get confused on EV though.