2023 Midyear Review of Index ETFs and Smart Beta Strategies

Approaching 2023, the experts were in near unanimity that the fourth quarter of 2022 was little more than a dead cat bounce and that once the inevitable recession hit, the bear market would quickly take the S&P 500 Index to new lows.  Instead, the first six months have seen the Nasdaq-100 ETF, Invesco QQQ rise … Read more

How Have Expert Stock Selection ETFs Performed in this Decade Thus Far?

Throughout my career, I’ve heard professional investors assert that index funds are fine for bull markets but in volatile-to-down markets, active management will outperform.  SPIVA (S&P vs. Global) published research available from S&P Global has demonstrated that this was not true for actively managed mutual funds for 2022, and less true for the 2020-2022 period.  … Read more

The Many Dimensions of Technology ETFs and the Stocks They Hold

The US Stock Market, led by technology, has outperformed most expectations this year. Going into Memorial Day weekend, SPY, the most popular S&P 500 ETF, has risen more than 10%. That’s a very impressive number in the face of many of the best-known strategists predicting a down year for the major index in 2023.   As … Read more

Ill-Defined Outcomes – Results of a Research Study on Downside Mitigation ETFs

2022 provided a litmus test for ETFs designed to shield Investors from the full impact of a major stock market decline. The bad news is that half of them failed.  The good news is that three of them actually did perform in line with their objectives. These are the results of a recent study that I co-authored … Read more

GARP with Yield and Excluding Falling Knives

GARP is an acronym used in the investment industry to connote “growth at reasonable prices.”  Last week, we discussed the market size and style trends year-to-date and what our models expect to see for the year ahead.  The bottom line is that both our predictive and valuation models thought the mega-cap-weighted ETFs, such as QQQ, … Read more

Large-Cap Growth Rampage Could Be Creating Small-Cap Value Opportunities

In January, we published “Rotating Regimes – What to Plan For in 2023.” At that time, we recounted that the 2022 US Stock Market was a conflagration that wiped out almost everything in its path with the exception of a few industries and ETFs. At that time, we reported that two Benchmark ETFs we track, … Read more

Which S&P 500 Stocks Are Currently Most Attractive?

Those of you who follow ValuEngine’s weekly lists of top-rated, (5 rated on scale of 1 to 5), Strong Buy stocks may have noticed that most of these stocks tend to be in the lower half of the market cap spectrum.  This is a function of the fact that our scores are tied to our … Read more

Déjà vu – Will Tech Stocks and ETFs Crash Again?

Watching tech stocks lead the market resurgence in the first six weeks of Q1 2023, I was hit with a flash of déjà vu. Just six months ago, the market slaughter of the first six months of 2022 was led by a strong upsurge in the first six weeks of 2022 by beaten-up growth stocks.  … Read more

AI, ETFs and Stock Picking

Artificial intelligence (AI), the concept that a machine created brain could outperform the human brain, has fascinated and terrified humans since the days of Jules Verne.  Real life examples such as Deep Blue defeating Chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov and IBM Watson defeating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy intrigues us even more.  Machine learning techniques, expert algorithms … Read more

5 US Stocks to Consider Now for Conservative Portfolios

Looking at this week’s list of stocks rated 5 (Strong Buy) from ValuEngine for year-ahead performance, I note that there are a number of relatively well-known large cap and midcap stocks that meet my minimum criteria as appropriate for conservative institutional-quality portfolios. As we will see, all five are in popular large cap and midcap … Read more