ETF Global

September 25:

Quant’s message is a consistent one lately as the top ranked funds continue to represent liquid markets and ones that should benefit from easy Fed money.  A couple of Vanguard funds, their Information Technology and Energy Sector funds (VGT and VDE) had double digit moves into the top 10 at 2^nd and 6^th place respectively.  With volatility so low, puts are cheap and someone was buying a bunch of them on those two funds.  A notable mover in Quant’s equity ranks yesterday was the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production Index Fund (IEO) jumping 104 positions into 14^th place.  Put buying played a role again but so did an improving intermediate technical rank.  All 15 Quant categories can be seen on our ETFG Quant page under the Research tab, each category is a compilation of proprietary metrics that have proven to identify relative performance, both positive and negative.  Looking at the sectors represented in Quant’s top 100 we see 11 Energy funds, 8 Basic Materials, and 7 in the Info Tech sector.  Health Care, Industrials and Financials have 3, 2 and 1 fund in the top 100 respectively and the other 6 sectors are not represented in this top slice of 812 equity funds.  This is basically how it has looked all month as markets position for Bernanke’s monetary expansion.  Quant agrees with the old maxim, don’t fight the Fed.