Fraud Alert?

I am trying to figure out if this email I got is a pure scam or not (I'll explain why below):

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: outlook financial
Date: Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 5:48 PM
Subject: Banner Advertising for Outlook Financial
To: outlookfinancial@gmail.com

Hello

We are interested in placing our banner on your site as previously discussed for http://www.outlookfinancial.com .

Attached is the 125x125 gif for your approval. Under 12kb.

To move ahead, I would need the following...

- An invoice (as a MS Word or text doc) with date, URL, duration of 30 days mentioned, and amount we agreed on.

- Your paypal info. If you don't have, you can signup for free at paypal.com

Once we have the above, we can paypal the amount agreed for 30 days of banner advertising on your site

and will send you an email when payment has been sent. At this point, you should place the banner on your site.

Please link it to http://www.outlookfinancial.com

We would expect the banner provided (attached) to go on the site immediately and stay for 30 days.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Thanks

Mark

If the guy was really from Outlookfinancial, his email would end with @outlookfinancial.com. His banner would be more than a GIF (it would have a link to trace the referring site). And why is he so insistent on getting my Paypal info (he sent a few emails after that but never replied directly to any of my requests)?

That said, even with my Paypal ID, I don't see what he could get out of it. The only thing I could see is if somebody was trying to get free advertising for a while (I put up the advertisement for a little bit before realizing this might just be a fraud). I can't believe though that a public company like OutlookFinancial would be involved in such a scheme. I sent them an email to verify if this was a legit request or not ...

I've changed my Paypal ID just in case. Do you guys have any idea what's the deal?

From the press releases bin: Claymore lowers costs on Core ETFs

I got a press release sent directly to me from Claymore Investments ...

The main point they make is the following:
"The annual management fee on the CorePortfolios™ will be reduced from 0.70% to 0.25%."

My first thought, was "wow!", this is huge. If you read a little bit more , they say this: "Accordingly, Claymore will no longer rebate back the fees of underlying Claymore ETFs held within the CorePortfolio™ ETFs. These changes will take effect immediately "

So they will remove rebates from the underlying ETFs. Yes, it does make it more transparent as Som Seif, President and CEO is saying.

I imagined that there was still some real rebate involved for the investor for them to make such a big announcement, so I've asked Sara Beazely from their public relations department what was the net rebate. Here's what she had to say:
"The net % gain for investors will be approximately 5bps on Growth and 10bps on Income. So, overall the net gain for investors (after the rebates of underlying ETFs are taken away) will be 5 – 10 bps."

So it seems that these are good news for Claymore customers.

If you wonder what the core ETFs are:
"Claymore CorePortfolio™ ETFs, which are the Claymore Balanced Income CorePortfolio™ ETF (TSX: CBD/CBD.A) and Claymore Balanced Growth CorePortfolio™ ETF (TSX: CBN/CBN.A) are asset allocation portfolio solutions using exchange traded funds to create efficient, balanced and diversified portfolios tailored to specific investment goals and risk profiles"

The problem with market share ETFs/indexes

The problem with indexes ETFs or funds is that they hold bad companies like Nortel. XIU for example still has a small amount of Nortel. Maybe it's time to look at dividend achievers indexes ETFs like CDZ which doesn't hold Nortel.

I wonder if dividend achievers companies have less chance to go bankrupt since they might have a more solid history of good revenues and a more sound business model than other companies ...

I'm back in the stocks game! (well, a tiny little bit)

Although there are probably some bad economic times ahead, I couldn't resist buying a small amount of XIU at 13.60 ...

Reminder: ING Direct has a bonus for TFSA accounts

Many blogs have reported it (including this one!), but here's another reminder: ING Direct gives you a bonus until the end of the year if you register right now for their TFSA account.