Steady But Not Uneventful

Monday, May 8, 2017 – Last week was, for all things considered, a fairly steady week in the performance of the respective equity markets with none of the major indexes fluctuating by more than .4% on any day and all ending the week slightly up. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained .3%, the S&P 500 gained .6%, and the NASDAQ gained .9%. This past week also saw every sector record a gain with the exception of Energy which had a .78% loss. The top gaining sectors this week were Financials (1.32%), Technology (1.08%) and Industrials (.87%).

The week was highlighted by the Fed announcing that they would keep the federal funds rate between .75% - 1% yet we think the window remains open for an increase in June based partially on the release of the April Jobs report that reflect there were 211,000 jobs added in April, which was higher than expected. This was a huge increase from the 79,000 that were added in March and compounded by the unemployment rate decreasing to 4.4% and its lowest level in 10 years. Lastly in the news, the week also saw the House of Representatives narrowly pass a new health care bill that will replace the Affordable Care Act. Now it is up to the Senate to vote on the bill, which will happen in the next few months.

As of the end of the week, 357 of the 500 components of the S&P 500 Index had reported earnings for the quarter. One of the companies that reported their earnings this week was AAPL. Apple announced that it had $52.9B in revenue with $11.03B profit. That is a decrease from last quarter’s results of $78.4 Billion in revenue and $17.89 Billion in profit. Taking a look at the ETF Global ETF Exposure report, we can see which ETFs have the biggest stake in AAPL. They are IYW (iShares US Technology ETF), XLK (Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund) and VGT (Vanguard Information Technology ETF). They each held 17.47%, 14.98% and 14.71% respectively.

ETFG Weekly Select List - This week, we have 3 new funds making it into the top spot in their respective categories in our weekly select list. XRT (SPDR S&P Retail ETF) was number 1 in the Consumer Discretionary category, HACK (PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF) in the Technology category and ILF (iShares Latin America 40 ETF) in the Latin America category.

ETFG Quant Movers - In the ETFG Quant Movers section this week, the biggest gainers were QQQE (Direxion NASDAQ 100 Equal Weighted Index Shares) which gained 34.96% in their ETFG Quant score, KNOW (Direxion All Cap Insider Sentiment Shares), which gained 27.84% and FTW (First Trust AlphaDEX Fund) which gained 17.03%. The biggest losers are BTAL (Quant shares US Market Neutral Anti-Beta Fund) which lost 22.53%, KSA (iShares MSCI Saudi Arabia Capped ETF) which lost 22.01%, and DIVA (Quantshares Hedged Dividend Income Fund) which lost  20.19%.

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