Moderate Risk Investors May Prefer A Conservative ETF Portfolio

By Gary Gordon: Wasn’t it just a week ago when the 10-year treasury yield pushed 2.3%? Wasn’t it just a few days back when bond vigilantes piled into ETFs like ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT)?

Richard Shaw (QVM Group) submits: Based on current and recent price behavior, these U.S. sector ETFs are the better trend following choices among the 10 U.S. sectors (as of 2011-05-11):

ByGary Jakacky:By comparing the performance of the SPDRS S&P 500 Index Trust ETF (SPY) to its 9 component sector Spyders, investors can sometimes obtain clues to how the economy will perform in the near future. In this article I want to highlight how two of the sector ETFs, both underperformers, are sending a consistent, in fact an optimistic, message about the economy for 2013.

By Bret Jensen:One of the keys to achieving outperformance as an investor is being aware of and taking advantage of sector rotations within the market. A lot of a portfolio's yearly performance is due to allocations to the right sectors, not necessarily the right stocks. A good example of this in 2012 was investments in the refinery sector.

Michael Albert submits: There appears to be quite a bit of angst among investors in recent weeks, prompted mostly by the heavy sell off in some high flying commodities. I noted on April 26 in an article I published here on SeekingAlpha that silver, in particular, was very close to a mean reversion moment – a mere two days before the decline. This was not based on a hunch, but rather an analysis of silver's price rise in the prior rolling month relative to all other areas of the investable landscape.

Dr. Oliver Schwindler, CAIA submits: Last week I presented the concept of equally-weighted risk contribution (ERC) portfolios and showed that this risk-based indexation methodology can deliver alpha compared to classical benchmarks like the S&P 500. I want to give readers a quick update on the recent performance.

Michael Albert submits: On December 27th of last year I published an article titled “Prepare for a January Correction” in which I argued that the performance of lower beta sectors which tend to do well in declines were potentially bottoming relative to the S&P 500.

By Richard Bloch:So far this year, ETF fund flows indicate that investors are putting money to work in several sectors that were out of favor last year.I took at look at the nine major S&P500 sectors. Each stock in the S&P 500 belongs to one of these sectors, and each has its own SPDR Sector ETF. So looking at all nine offers some perspective on what's pushing the index higher this year,These ETFs include: