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 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
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 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
The Editor-in-Chief of well-respected publisher ETF Stream, Tom Eckett, published a rare editorial Friday March 24 saying the big selloff in banks due to fear of contagion was close to over. He said at these levels, bank ETFs were at rarely seen low levels compared with earnings expectations and should not be thrown off too … Read more
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
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
In general, 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. The ETF reports on ValuEngine for ETFs that follow market benchmarks provide a side benefit in writing market analyses. They are a window to implicit forecasts for 3-, … 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