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

A November to Remember While Recession Warnings Persist

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

Reviewing the 3rd Quarter While Looking Ahead to Year-End

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

Case Study of a Ten-Year Actively Managed ETF

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

How Have Expert Stock Selection ETFs Performed in this Decade Thus Far?

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

Ill-Defined Outcomes – Results of a Research Study on Downside Mitigation ETFs

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 with Yield and Excluding Falling Knives

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

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

Bank Stocks and ETFs – Time to Buy?

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

Which S&P 500 Stocks Are Currently Most Attractive?

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