NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wall Street’s advice to investors battered by plunging markets: Keep buying stocks.
With markets plunging for more than a week, and no relief in sight, some of the biggest brokerages on Thursday afternoon and early on Friday told their advisers that clients should not flee but instead buy into the panic.
The Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 300 points and erased its gains for the year as investors grew more concerned about economic weakness in the U.S. and Europe.
ompanies that allow home investors to trade foreign currencies are coming under fire as regulators consider whether to put more rules on the fast-growing but risky market.
Currency brokers allow ordinary Americans to speculate on the value of dollars, euros and yen, and have grown revenue 374% since 2007, drawing in 615,000 American traders, according to the Aite Group consulting firm.
The most intense recent criticism of these brokers came from a hedge fund manager who researches and invests in companies that cater to home investors.
Gold stocks normally amplify the gains from gold. If gold goes up 10%, then a good gold stock should go up 20%. So traders look for this ‘leverage’ to the gold price in gold stocks.
That was until ETFs became such a big force on the market.
Now traders can invest directly in gold ETFs with borrowed money to get the same effect. It saves having to do all that annoying research into a gold company.
So with all that money heading for the ETFs – instead of the stocks – the gold price and gold stocks are diverging.
Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today announced the publication in the Federal Register of final regulations concerning off-exchange retail foreign currency transactions. The rules implement provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, which, together, provide the CFTC with broad authority to register and regulate entities wishing to serve as counterparties to, or to intermediate, retail foreign exchange (forex) transactions.