Our last blog discussed safe harbors amidst the current storm of market volatility. The idea presented was to investigate the strong buy stocks with the lowest betas. This week we home in on a sector that is typically low volatility and low growth. Currently we find fairly competitive earnings growth in this sector. We look … Read more
I will often feature stocks rated buy or strong buy in highly rated sectors. This one is a departure. The healthcare sector is most commonly represented by the Select Sector SPDR Healthcare ETF, XLV. It faced a challenging year in 2024, underperforming the S&P 500 Index by a staggering 22.4%. This massive performance shortfall resulted … Read more
Conversations about Trump’s tariffs, despite two of them being placed on hold for now, continue to dominate market discussions. Although it could be different this time, historically these announcements cause volatility in the short run. But by about the time they become reality, if not before, their effects are absorbed by the market with barely … Read more
Following on last week’s top 10 list, this week’s blog focuses on ETFs related to the stocks in the list. We begin with lots and lots of data in the form of several tables, and end with our written analysis. Skip to the end if you prefer to jump to the conclusions we make on … Read more
As classified by ETF Database (etfdb.com) by VettaFi, there are currently 92 dividend focused US ETFs with nearly $460 billion under management. If you are seeking dividend income from your ETFs, which should you take a close look at? That’s the objective of the analysis in today’s research blog entry. All 5,200+ stocks US and … Read more
Farewell and thank you to 2023 which exceeded almost everybody’s expectations after a dismal 2022 and predictions of a dire recession. This blog was more positive than most, projecting a 5% to 10% gain for the S&P 500 vs. the actual price gain of 23.9%. Now it’s on to 2024. Let’s start with our quarterly … Read more
Despite all the negative-to-flat market expectations from Wall Street specialists and other pundits that frequent CNBC for 2023, the recession they feared did not manifest itself, soft landing or otherwise. The economy continued to be strong enough to avoid negative GDP growth. S&P 500 Index ETFs, including SPLG, continue to outperform other broad-based benchmark ETFs … Read more
The “Magnificent Seven” has now replaced “FAMANGs” as the nickname for current market leadership. It is also a somewhat deridingly used term for the “overpriced” stocks hated by value managers. Holdovers include Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Gone is Netflix. New are Nvidia and Tesla while Facebook had a facelift to be renamed Meta. As … Read more
The third quarter of 2023 is now history. The September effect overwhelmed mildly positive returns in July and August to submerge all six benchmark indexes we monitor quarterly into the red. Although the order of best to worst varies among the six indexes, one commonality is having September as the worst historical month, both in … Read more
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