With $600 billion in assets, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have become an increasingly popular investment alternative to mutual funds. What makes them attractive?

1) They are easy to trade – ETFs can be bought or sold on exchanges at anytime during the trading day

2) They often have lower expense ratios than many mutual funds, making them more cost efficient

3) They can quickly add diversification to an investment portfolio. Often containing baskets of stocks, ETFs can give portfolios exposure to different sectors and countries.

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Additionally, what makes ETFs so appealing is their ability to provide investment opportunities beyond stocks. With ETFs, individual investors have easy access to asset classes like commodities (e.g., oil, gold, grains, etc.), currencies (e.g., Euro, Japanese Yen, British Pound, Chinese Yuan, etc.), and different categories of bonds. These can all be traded just like stocks using an ordinary brokerage account through ETFs.

But with over 600 ETFs to choose from, how do you build a solid, well-diversified investment portfolio purely using ETFs?

This Labor Day, we’ll show you how to build one. We’ll also delve more into the world commodity, currency, and bond ETFs and, explain why they should be a key part to your diversified investment portfolio.

Don’t miss Bob Pisani’s half-hour special on Monday at 12 noon ET.

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Questions?  Comments?