To sit out and pooh-pooh the rally is to miss a major opportunity for gains, as well as a missed opportunity to make up what was lost in battered portfolios. Investors hiding in the safety of money market funds aren't making anything from those paltry yields.

Add global real estate to your portfolio through ETFs.

Highflying sector and leveraged ETFs dominate the headlines, luring investors to chase recent performance. Often lost in the shuffle is that plain-vanilla ETFs sporting rock-bottom fees and tracking wide swaths of the market are better tools for most investors -- even if theyâ??re not as sharp.

U.S. stock investors zero in on the housing market to gauge economic growth, with better-than-anticipated earnings from Lowe's helping boost sentiment.

The stock market has for weeks been dogged by talk of trouble lurking in commercial real estate, yet investors focused on the Dow Jones Real Estate Index must not have gotten the memo.