Why Brazil ETFs and Australia ETFs Will Forecast The Return of Global Growth

Gary Gordon submits: Analysts like Bob Doll at Blackrock believe that U.S. economic growth will accelerate, with GDP likely to come in at a vibrant 3.5% for 2011. Economists polled at the Economist Intelligence Unit may be a little less enthusiastic, but they have raised their forecasts from 3.0% to 3.1%.

By Richard Shaw (QVM Group): This table shows the best and worst three-month, one-year and three-year total return, the trailing yield, and the standard deviation, mean return and Sharpe Ratio for three years, five years and 10 years for ETFs that are proxies for the S&P 500 and nine sectors.

Michael Johnston submits:Recent weeks have highlighted the “new normal” in the investing world, as concerns of a debt crisis in Europe have rippled throughout the global economy. On Wall Street, developments in the streets of Athens and the German Bundestag have trumped more local economic indicators, as U.S. markets have taken their cues from across the pond in recent weeks.

By Alex Rasmussen:For investors looking to capitalize on sector trends, the Select Sector SPDR ETFs are a great option. Established and with significant volume, liquidity is not an issue for any of these ETFs. In order to find out how to best position our portfolios for 2012, I thought I'd break it down into three steps: Take a look at Past Performance Macro Discussion Valuation of Holdings Past Performance

MyPlanIQ submits:MyPlanIQ tracks detailed weekly U.S. sectors trend movements. We use ETFs that represent each sector and present the results here. More details can be found in MyPlanIQ 360 Degree Market View. Energy (XLE), Materials (XLB), and Industrials (XLI) remain as the top three sectors this week.

MyPlanIQ submits:U.S. sectors are classified as segments in the economy within which a large group of companies can be clustered. All U.S. sectors showed good performance last year except for the financial industry. The industries which showed substantial growth were energy, material and telecom industries, and all the others are more or less the same. Assets Class Symbols

By MyPlanIQ:U.S. stock market rose 0.87% for the week (Vanguard total stock market ETF VTI). S&P 500 is again sitting at around 1250 line (1255 to be exact). With markets swinging back and forth, it is important to look at the market internals.

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.