Foreign Investment Funds

It is a good practice to own some foreign stocks thus lowering your risk with diversification and increasing your return. Investors still need to do their homework well on any country and company in which they wish to invest. However, ready access to such research is sometimes very hard to get. Lower dollar in recent months have been favorable for some of the stocks, but if the dollar starts strengthening itself for an extended period, investors may find themselves in troubled water.

American Depository Receipts (ADR) have been a popular investment tool in recent months. The bulk of these listings are from Europe, though emerging markets are increasing in representation. ADRs from China and India have been very popular and successful investments. We can tell you so many names which have consistently produced good return, but, as you know, we always hesitate several times before investing in any individual stock.

Like all wise investors if you take the issue of diversification seriously and wish to put some money in ADRs to receive a chunk of the global rise of economy, we think there is something better than ADRs - That is an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) for ADRs. In fact, there are four of those.

Nasdaq Financial Products Services and The Bank of New York offers BLDRS, a family of exchange-traded funds ("ETFs") based on The Bank of New York ADR IndexSM, a real-time index tracking U.S. traded depositary receipts (For details visit the ADR IndexSM section of adrbny.com). The BLDRS Fund Family is currently made up of four ETFs, including two market index funds and two regional index funds:

1. BLDRS Emerging Markets 50 ADR Index Fund (ADRE),
2. BLDRS Developed Markets 100 ADR Index Fund(ADRD),
3. BLDRS Europe 100 ADR Index Fund(ADRU) ,
4. BLDRS Asia 50 ADR Index Fund (ADRA).

All of them have very low expense ratio of only 0.30. We think all of these are good long time investments especially for retirement accounts.