The Terrible Ten

“The Magnificent Seven” was the most popular sobriquet among stock market strategists, portfolio managers and reporters in 2023.  Stocks such as Google, Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple dominated performance and volume charts.  Almost unnoticed, Broadcom pushed its way to 4th in Market Cap in the Nasdaq and more than doubled in price last year … Read more

Turning the Page to 2024

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

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

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

Rotating Industry and Strategy ETFs YTD 2022

Between inflation skyrocketing beyond expectations, the drumbeats of war and increasing global sanctions on Russian Oil, macroeconomic themes have dominated the 2022 stock market 15 weeks into the year.  Throwing out derivatives-based ETFs, the top 11 US ETFs ranked by price performance this year are primarily focused on energy companies.   All of the approximately 5,000 … Read more

Cap-Weighted vs. Equally Weighted S&P 500 ETFs – Which is Better?

By Herb Blank Research Affiliates and Dimensional Fund Advisors have been among the esteemed research and investment firms proclaiming that equally weighted portfolios will deliver superior performance to portfolios weighted by market capitalization also known as cap-weighted. This article explores to what extent that has been true in recent years. IVV is the iShares S&P … Read more