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August 01, 2008 at 04:00 AM
Look at your calendar. We’ve already reached the half-way point of the year. How are your clients’ portfolios doing? Right now is a good time to evaluate the health of their investments. Are their portfolios progressing or digressing?
One good way to find out is to evaluate your stock and mutual fund holdings versus the exchange-traded funds tracking major benchmark indexes.
Total U.S. Stock Market Do your clients own domestic stock funds? If they do, then compare the performance of their funds to ETFs that follow key domestic equity barometers. This will give you context as to how well or poorly their active mutual funds are performing.
The SPDR DJ Wilshire 5000 ETF (TMW) or the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) can give you a good indication of where they stand. If a stock portfolio is badly underperforming either one of these ETFs, then it could be time to make some major adjustments.
Total Bond Market If a client owns any individual corporate bonds or a bond fund, see how they’ve been performing relative to major bond ETFs like Vanguard’s Bond Fund (BND).
If they own individual government bonds, consider a switch to products with simpler maturities. Barclay’s iShares offers a series of six Treasury-bond ETFs with maturities ranging from short term (SHV) and intermediate (IEF) to long term (TLT).
International Stocks Do your clients own any foreign stock funds? If so, don’t forget to benchmark them against the performance of ETFs that track major foreign indexes.
The SPDR MSCI All World ETF (CWI) or Vanguard FTSE All World ETF (VEU) can give you perspective on how well or how poorly a client’s foreign stocks are performing.
