11/17/2025 ValuEngine Weekly Market Summary & Commentary

Weekly Market Recap – Week Ending November 14, 2025 The past week saw a clear defensive tilt across major ETFs, with only a handful of pockets showing resilience. Utilities, consumer staples, and select dividend strategies managed modest gains, while growth-heavy benchmarks such as QQQM and technology-sector ETFs slipped more than 2%. At the individual-stock level, … Read more

Evolution of GICS Consumer Discretionary Sector and XLY ETF

The Consumer Discretionary sector of the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) was established in 1999 to represent cyclical industries. It has undergone several significant revisions to reflect the evolution of the global economy, primarily in 2018 and 2023, as business models shifted.  All research 5,000+ stocks and 700+ ETFs updated on www.ValuEngine.com When GICS was … Read more

Pinpointing Targets in the Financial Sector

The Finance Sector is ranked as #3 among the 15 we cover for year-ahead returns by the ValuEngine forecast model.  Finance sector stocks and ETFs along with the previously profiled utilities sector are generally perceived as stodgy stocks that are most commonly bought by older investors for dividend yield.  However, that has not been true … Read more

Health Care Sector Trying to Bounce Back

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

Quantitative Investment Modeling – 120 Years Since Bachelier: Part 2 (After Computers)

Part I of this article (posted on Blog.ValuEngine.com on May 22, click HERE) started with Louis Bachelier’s work from 1900 and covered all the theoretical work done up to and including William Sharpe, Ph.D.’s seminal work in 1964.  However, none of that early research had yet been applied successfully to actual investments in any meaningful … Read more

Quantitative Investment Modeling – 120 Years Since Bachelier: Part 1 (Before Computers)

The history of quantitative analysis goes back far before computers, and this work leads directly into how the field progresses once computers can be applied. In this first post we explore the history and development of quantitative analysis as it applied to finance in the pre-computer world of the early through mid 20th century. Actively … 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

Good Riddance to the First Half of 2022: What next?

There was a hilarious Match.com commercial at the end of 2020 where the year, portrayed by Kristen Bell, became a perfect match for Satan. This is exactly how many equity investors felt about the first half of 2022.   2020 turned out to be a good year for the market as the government stepped in with … Read more

Active ETF Gurus vs. GURU Index ETF

This week’s featured ETF is GURU, Global X Guru Index based on a specific “smart money” hedge fund strategy. Guru’s site claims that the index engineered by Global X and provided by German customized index specialist Solactive AG allows everyday investors to access the high conviction investments among the largest, most sophisticated hedge funds in … Read more