Posts for Ticker ‘WIP’

IBM And The Rebirth Of Outsourcing (IBM)(INFY)(WIP)

bear26A couple of month ago, India’s chief finance minister may have made calls to the heads of IBM (IBM) and several other large US tech companies to tell them that the huge developing nation was hemorrhaging high-end tech jobs. Whether the call happened or not, looking at statistics from India it would be easy to see that the costs of outsourcing technology work to firms based in there is dropping as unemployment in the country rise.

For a number of years, unions and members of Congress spent a great deal of time complaining about the number of US jobs being sent abroad. The bitterness about the issue seems to have receded recently, especially as the recession has deepened and large American companies have been inclined to cut jobs as much or more than they have been able to export them. Perhaps with the economy losing about 600,000 jobs a month, the need for efficiency though outsourcing has become less immediate. Read More »

Posted on: March 26, 2009 – 4:13 am in Technology, , ,

ETF LAUNCH: Foreign Government Inflation-Index Bonds

There is a new ETF launching today, and this one is a foreign government bond inflation-protected ETF.  State Street Global Advisors, the investment management arm of State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) announced that the SPDR(R) DB International Government Inflation-Protected Bond ETF (Ticker: WIP) is set to begin trading on the American Stock Exchange.

The SPDR DB International Government Inflation-Protected Bond ETF, besides being a mouthful of words, is designed to track the performance of the DB Global Government ex-US Inflation-Linked Bond Capped Index.  The index includes 120 inflation-indexed bonds from 18 developed and emerging countries outside of the US.

In order to be included in this index, the bonds must be capital-indexed and linked to an eligible inflation index with at least one-year remaining to maturity.  They must also have a fixed, step-up, or zero notional coupon and must settle on or before the Index rebalancing date.  The Fund’s expense ratio is 0.50 percent.

Some ETF’s catch on like fire.  Others fail to gain major traction.  The more straightforward and the more simple ETF’s tend to see more liquidity than the complex and less direct ETF’s.   This one is more than fairly diverse and many will have a hard time tracking what all is in the ETF.

Jon C. Ogg
March 19, 2008

Posted on: March 19, 2008 – 9:26 am in ETF, ,