iShares ETFs
Wow. Taking a page from the Book of Simon, a snippit from the Canadian Capitalist, and my own touch of desire for the exotic I hit up iShares.
For too long I have sat on the side lines of the Index Funds game. Calculating which one would receive the gift of my one G. But the Templar Knight’s warning from Indiana’s Last Crusade was always lurking in the back of my mind. I was mortified of choosing unwisely, lest I turn into a shouting skeleton and then dust.
Honestly I’m terrified to part with that much money to one place. Sounds stupid? Well maybe, especially considering I can’t wait to throw scads of money out of my account when I finally go to buy a laptop. Eitherway, I’ll go ahead and say that the $1000 minimum buy-in to mutual funds is persecution against the novice business-boy. A scare tactic to keep out the riff-raff. And it works.
Enter iShares. Nice website & logo, piss poor name, respectable parent company. And what a selection of ETFs. For those who do not know an ETF is an Exchange Traded Fund. These things are the Maynard’s Juicy Squirts Berry of the investment world. Basically you get all the goods from index funds, plus a bit more granularity, WITHOUT the $1000 to get your foot in the door. Sort of like the poor man’s lazy strategy.
But the beauty of iShares is the diversity of ETFs that they offer. Rather than just Tracking an Index (S&P500, TSE etc) they index sectors, commodities & styles Tech/Gold/Dividend/International/Market Cap you name it. This allows me to make an international index investment, without losing sleep of putting all my eggs in the High-Risk basket. So I can take my 1000 Dollars divide it to get some more diversity, on top of the diversity already afforded by index funds.
To get more on Canadian ETFs go to http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/etf . Thumbs Up.
