Follow Up To Burma

I had the following question left on my Burma post from yesterday that I wanted to try to answer.

I hope you will comment on ways to get IRA money out of the US dollar other than buying US listed foreign stocks. Are there places other than Everbank (where the IRA process is cumbersome and expensive) to get foreign currency CDs and bonds? Where even the interest is paid in the other currency(ies)?

I'm sorry I do not know. Thanks for stopping by, goodnight everybody.

Seriously I really am not an expert in the more esoteric ways to access IRA money or where and how it can be moved around. I have co-workers to help me beyond the basics. But the bigger question is about expense. Small currency transactions will always be expensive, keep in mind small could mean low six figures. Barron's profiled a company over the weekend called COESfx. This may not be the end goal of opening an IRA, transferring a rollover with $50,000 and buying two or three currencies cheaply but it might be cheaper than some of the other options out there. If I have time I will explore what they have and post about it.

Take the above paragraph as a cattle call to post a link to any institution that is relevant to this discussion.

But assuming $10 currency trades for people that don't want to trade a lot are not quite here yet, what is the way to go?

I will expand the topic to include all the bomb shelter asset classes I have been writing about recently.

Just about every commodity out there is priced in dollars. Here is more info about the DB commodity ETF, DBC, from ETFInvestor.

Any further exploration into commodities with future products will be dollar based but will still likely continue to have a low correlation to US stocks. If the dollar gets weaker, a commodity priced in dollars, everything else being equal, will go up in value.

Any of the currency products will also do the job of protecting against a weak dollar. Perhaps not as exact as someone would like but most of the effect will be captured which is better than nothing.

Recently I bought a foreign stock traded in another country (that is an ordinary share, not an ADR traded here). These are tough to trade (which is why I am in the process of transferring to Schwab, I am fed up with Ameritrade's lousy service and lack of resources) and get information on, but not impossible. Again this is not the exact thing the reader is looking for but it is close.

You can open accounts with non-qualified money even if IRAs are a no go. I am in the process of trying to open an account in Iceland which I will write about when I'm done (hopefully soon). Along these lines, do not open an account in New Zealand. The tax on interest is close to half. It would be cheaper to use Everbank for the kiwi.

One thing to remember is that topics like this are not really mainstream just yet. If they are not mainstream it may be tougher to find how to access these themes for a while to come.