Michael Johnston submits: Equity markets were range-bound last week, struggling to make significant moves in either direction. Gold took a big tumble early in the week, dropping well below the $1,400 mark as concerns over the health of the global economy subsided. Wall Street also rallied in the middle of the week following a round [...]
Roger Nusbaum submits: There was a peculiar exchange on CNBC the other day between Mark Haines and a guest touting Abbott Labs (ABT) as a value stock. Haines asked why anyone would want to buy such a stinker of a stock, noting that it has lagged badly since the March 2009 low. It is essentially [...]
MyPlanIQ submits: Making tactical asset allocation decisions based on major asset price trends is an effective way to achieve reasonable returns while reducing risk. Recently, risk assets have been on a tear. It began with the year-end rally, but now most risk assets are showing fatigue. Last week, except for U.S. equities, most risk assets [...]
David Oldenburg submits: Are all ETFs designed to lose money over time? Is this just the price we pay for wanting to be diversified – or even leveraged – in a particular sector? If we take a close look at ETFs over the 2010 year, we see a big problem for long-term investors who feel [...]
Ron Rowland submits: Nearly four years ago, Rydex|SGI Managed Futures Strategy (RYMFX), a fund designed to track the S&P Diversified Trends Indicator (S&P DTI Index) arrived on the scene. Earlier this week (1/5/11), WisdomTree launched the first ETF to target the S&P DTI – WisdomTree Managed Futures Strategy Fund (WDTI). WDTI seeks to achieve positive [...]
MyPlanIQ submits: The relative performance among sector ETFs stayed roughly this week, with the top sectors in 2010 — energy (XLE), consumer discretionary (XLY) and materials (XLB) — retaining their top spots, although the upward momentum we saw in energy and materials did not continue into the new year. One can gain critical insights into [...]
Geoffrey Ching submits: A couple of months ago, I outlined a strategy for investing in country ETFs. It ranks stock markets of developed markets and a few major emerging markets by valuation and momentum. Valuation is often one of the largest factors determining long term returns, while momentum has been more predictive of the short [...]
MyPlanIQ submits: International REITs (RWX) and U.S. REITs (IYR, ICF) continue to retain their top spots in performance trend ranking. They are followed by several U.S. stock dividend ETFs. For more details, please refer to the table below and performance page here. Assets Class Symbols 01/05 Trend Complete Story »
Joe Eqcome submits: Outlook: The majority of global equity markets did much better in 2010 than investors might have thought given the surfeit of things to worry about. The Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), “Word, All” index was up approximately 10% last year. (Click the "financial cartoon".) Most major global stock markets were up in [...]
As followers of this series know, ETFs relating to precious metals have appeared often in this weekly ETF pullback strategy (see Appendix below for explanation and performance data) as 2010 came to a close. They weren’t there at the very end of the year, but they’re back in the first rebalance of 2011. Here’s the [...]
