Thursday Tidbits

Tom Lydon from ETFTrends had a link to a research boutique called Altavista Independent Research that does what appears to be a type of bottoms stock-like analysis of the ETFs it covers. They have research on 13 what it calls broad market ETFs which includes style and cap weighted funds and DVY. They also have research on the nine Select Sector SPDRs (not sub sector) and nine international EFTs including EEM and several single country funds.

There were two (that I could find anyway) sample reports from a ways back that weren't wrong per se but I don' think were spectacularly correct either but my initial reaction may not be right.

My initial reaction is that they cover too small a universe but they do say that they cover most of the dollars held in ETFs which I'm sure is true. I will try to call them to see if anyone there will tell me what they are about.

IndexUniverse is reporting that ETF Securities, the firm with all the commodity ETFs that trade in London but not accessible in the US, is cross listing its funds on Euronext. The article raises the obvious point that maybe this will lead access through the NYSE but no, or maybe more correctly, not yet. PowerShares and Deutsche Bank have some things in the works that could improve the space that I will try to learn more about.

Lastly some fun with Pakistan. This chart compares the benchmark KSE 100 Index with Pakistan Telecom which I presume is the big telephone company.

As you can see it was a good proxy for a while but not so lately. I don't think Pakistan Telecom is investible; there are no accounts at Schwab that own it which is a decent barometer for accessibility. As an amusing anecdote there is one account that owns Bank of Cyprus (BCYPF), you know, as in Cyprus.

I should add, before anyone thinks their privacy is being violated with this info it is not. There is a screen that will show all account numbers that hold a stock (BTW it is very unlikely that anyone answering the phone will know this screen). All I am asking is do any clients own it and the only answer I am getting is yes or no, or in the case of Bank of Cyprus "yes just one." This is a good way to tell whether a stock can be traded through Schwab without having to call the global desk during the trading day which I find gives me a 50/50 shot of being spoken to rudely.

Pakistan seems like it is several years from being investible and even then I don't know that I would want to but the point is that for now we don't need to know. I think of this sort of thing as the early learning stages. If somehow Pakistan becomes the best place to invest in 2012 I won't have to start learning it then from scratch, I would have several years of study behind me.