In a continuing theme of diversify my cash holdings into currencies other than the $US, I used the opportunity of Yen correcting about 8% over the past 2 weeks to buy into FXY at $95.39. FXY, a CurrencyShares Yen Trust, is the easiest, lowest cost and most liquid instrument that I know of for virtually converting $US into Japanese Yen. FXY has current support at around $95 per trust share.

FXC is a CurrencyShares Canadian Dollar Trust. Simply said, it is a convenient vehicle for those of us in the US for holding funds and collecting interest on them in Canadian Dollars (Loonies). It is far more convenient and less expensive (for reasonably small amounts) than the alternative of converting the funds, depositing them at a Canadian bank and than withdrawing and converting them back. Today was an interesting day in the markets, as many commodities and related companies' stocks took a bigger tumble than the market as a whole.

Can somebody please tell me how Bear Stearns (BSC) stayed in business all this time?

I have searched far and wide for a good definition of portfolio historical relative volatility. I started by looking at the standard mathematical definition of volatility and proceeded to research and analyze Beta, modified Sharpe, Sortino and Treynor ratios and the daily historical volatility that they measure for various mutual funds. After playing around with these and several other definitions from Modern and Post Modern Portfolio Theories I came to the realization that none of these measures, no matter how sophisticated and computationally intensive, gave me what I was really after.

Disclosure: Established in 1995, Fisher Investments Private Client Group is a division of Fisher Investments that offers money management services to qualified individuals on a separately managed account basis. All mentions of Fisher Investments in this article are in reference to their Private Client Group. Fisher Investments account performance analyzed for this article applies to Global Total Return modeled accounts that have no client restrictions.