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I'm holding an amount much larger than 100K in my savings account at JP Morgan. I'm a little nervous about some of the news stories I am reading. What do I need to be doing in next few days to " park " this money safely until I have opportunity to make sound decisions. Thank you for your advice.

http://www.fdic.gov/deposit/Deposits/insured/basics.html

 

See Calathea and read on the link. You may be able to recharactorize the ownership of some of the money and divide the CDs so that you are FDIC covered for every dollar. Another alternative is to invest the amount over the insurance limit in Treasury bills. You can do this quickly and simply by buying shares of the SPDR 1-3 month Treasury bills ETF, ticker symbol BIL. It's current yield is 3.3 percent.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=bil

 Scott

You quoted the “current” yield for BIL at 3.3% on several occasions.  Don’t know why you keep quoting that yield but it hasn’t been 3.3% for quite sometime.  The current indicated yield is 1.43%.  The 12-month yield is 2.98% (what has been paid over the trailing 12 months).  It paid a .055761 dividend in July which is equal to a current yield of 1.43% as of today’s close.  BIL has returned 1.23% YTD as of 07/16/08 (or 2.28% annualized) and has a trailing on year return of 3.15%.  The US 90 T-Bill which the ETF holds was quoted at 1.35% today.  Where have you been?

 

So much for quickly and simply!  A. Dunlap

 

 A.D. is right. I used the wrong yield on BIL. I used the yield figure provided by the Yahoo Finance link included in the response. 

Unfortunately, Morningstar posts the same yield as Yahoo, 3.3 percent.http://quicktake.morningstar.com/etfnet/Snapshot.aspx?Country=USA&Symbol=BIL

A check with Bloomberg, however, would quickly have shown that the current yield on 3 month Treasuries is only 1.52 percent, so the current yield on BIL can't be 3.3 percent. http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates/index.html

MoneyCentral, http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/partsub/funds/etfreturns.asp?ETF=true&symbol=BIL, doesn't show a yield figure. Instead, it provides a YTD return (1.07 percent) and a trailing year return (3.15 percent).

Go to the ETF sponsor, State Street Global Advisors, and you'll find the source of the problem. SSGA provides a YTD return and a return they list as the annualized 1 year return, 3.31 percent. I suspect this is where both Yahoo Finance, Morningstar, and MoneyCentral get their figures but both Yahoo Finance and Morningstar appear to fail to distinguish between current yield and trailing return.

https://www.ssgafunds.com/etf/fund/etf_detail_BIL.jsp

Today, the SSGA site quotes a current yield of 1.52 percent.

The message here is to go to the original source, which I will do in the future. All that said, if you want security and liquidity instead of worry about your CDs, BIL is the answer. Unfortunately, lots of people are thinking the same thing, so yields on Treasury bills are way down.

Scott