Targeting Tech Stocks Below The Magnificent Seven Although the rise of the largest technology stocks known as “The Magnificent Seven” has not yet reached return levels experienced midway through 2023, they are off to another relatively strong start as a group. One stock that has stood out in particular is Nvidia (Ticker: NVDA) which has … 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 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
Cambria Advisors recently sent out a mailing that was somewhat self-congratulatory noting the 10-year anniversary of the launch of its first ETF. As we will explore shortly, I contend that the congratulations are well-deserved from a number of perspectives. The email missive piqued my interest for a specific reason. The main comparisons made in the … 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
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