Game Plan: Broad Investment Outline.

Here is a brief outline of things we are looking at/considering. We'll go into each of these in more detail over the coming days. As usual this is a broad view and is not meant to be client specific or considered in any manner as an investment recommendation. If you are not a client either do your own research, talk to your financial advisor or give us a call.

1. We are currently making the majority of our equity investments in Exchange Traded Funds {ETFs}. We have currently made no new individual equity purchases. This could change for some of our more aggressive accounts but we have currently not made any new commitments.

2. We are investing in many total return situations. The current economic crisis means many ETFs have very attractive dividend yields. For example, we have purchased recently for many clients ETFs with SEC yields in excess of 5%.

3. Certain ETF's with a more fixed income orientation are yielding in high single digits. We are also purchasing these for appropriate accounts.

4. We are purchasing major market etf's. We are doing this with a specific methodology as per client parameters. Our feeling is that these give us a certain amount of equity exposure and provide a certain amount of diversification during this period of market uncertainty. Simply put all the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 are probably not going to go out of business. ETF's based on these averages are not immune to the market decline, the S*P 500 ETF, SPY, for example is down just under 40% for this year. But etf's based on these indices are likely to be around when the dust settles. Plus right now these have really nice current yields. In many cases these yields are competitive with government bond yields. {Just remember you don't get the government guarantee with an ETF!}.

5. We don't buy everything all at once. We are scaling into positions.

6. Tax loss harvesting.

7. For client appropriate accounts, investing in certain sectors where we see particular growth characteristics or that we think might be advantaged by the political changes in Washington.

*Currently Long SPY and various S&P related ETFs for various client accounts.

ETFs are not risk less investments. Along with the potential for market fluctuation there is the potential for company specific execution risk. That is the potential that certain actions of the underlying companies that produce and support any ETF might by their actions cause the performance of said ETF to deviate significantly from the performance of its underlying index. Also not all ETFs are created equal. Also there could be risks to ETF's that we currently do not understand. You are welcome to call or email me with any specific questions regarding the use of ETFs. Casual readers of this blog should either consult their own investment advisor or obtain a prospectus from any specific ETF provider. Nothing in this blog or in this post should be construed as a recommendation by any person to purchase or sell any particular security. We specifically cannot give investment advice without knowing an investors particular risk/reward parameters.