“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
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
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
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
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
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
I have spent 40 years helping to develop, research and market quantitative investment products with new twists. The advent of alternative data including the use of web-gathered information introduced new products in that regard. This has led to published papers in refereed journals such as “Using Alternative Research Data in Real World Portfolios” using data … Read more
Six months ago, I discussed ways that investors could stay invested with one eye squarely on wealth preservation in a risk-on environment. We are still in a risk-on environment where the choices we reviewed in March are still relevant. One half of the list included five stock-based ETFs without derivatives that focus on stocks with … Read more
By Herbert Blank Actively managed ETFs have evolved very differently from index-driven ETFs. Most of the assets have been accumulated in actively managed fixed income ETFs while the vast preponderance of Assets Under Management in Equity ETFs are index driven. Although there are many legacy reasons for this, the fact is that the efficiencies of … Read more
The stock of the week is ticker AA (Alcoa Corporation). Alcoa is a global industry leader in bauxite, alumina and aluminum products. AA was a sell in mid 2019 by ValuEngine, but has come on strongly in the short term and is now rated a Strong Buy according to the models. We think it will … Read more