Tracking the Markets on Fed Day

Now that even Larry Summers is for easy money do we have anything to fear on this Fed day?  Six weeks ago, Chairman Bernanke said the only relevant question is how hard to press the accelerator yet world markets sensed a potential tapering and went into withdrawal spasms.  What will he say today and how will markets react?  The answer to the second question can be found on our home screen where we slice the international ETF markets into various asset class, geographic and sector indices.

It begins with our benchmark ETFG Global 500 Index, the world’s first that crosses regions and asset classes.  It represents the largest 500 exchange traded products excluding leveraged or inverse.  As more managers take advantage of ETFs to gain access to all regions and asset classes, they now have a benchmark that is relevant to their portfolios.  Below that and across the tabs are indices relevant to various slices of their portfolios.  Each of the asset class indices contains all those applicable products and we do the same thing by geography and sector.  Tomorrow morning, each of them will reflect how their group reacted to the Fed’s statement. 

The benchmark ETFG Global 500 is calculated real time on the home page as are the smart beta indices under the Dynamic tab, the Quant driven ETFG Quant Equity 10 and 12.  The former contains the top 10 ranked equity ETFs selected monthly and the latter is the top 12 that meet certain liquidity thresholds.  Both contain today’s top ranked SPDR S&P Metals and Mining Fund (XME).  The three indices are published and quoted widely beyond our home page under the tickers ETFG500, ETFGQE10 and ETFGQE12.  Despite lagging the S&P 500 year to date, they just celebrated their one year anniversary and both dynamic indices beat that benchmark as well as the MSCI ACWI index.

We provide data on the ETFG 500 free of charge to managers who want to benchmark against it and the others on a contractual basis.  We have more under development including a market neutral index that gained more than 10% in its first year.  We also construct indices according to client specifications; please contact us to learn more.  With our reflective indices and predictive scores and ratings, nobody makes navigating the international ETF markets easier than ETF Global^®.  Thanks for reading and please send any questions to support@etfg.com.