As the year comes to an end it’s a good time to look back and evaluate the performance of various groups of funds. We’ll start with the top 10 performing funds (active and non-leveraged) of the year. As you can see from this table, 2011 belonged to the bond funds. The only equity funds on the list are pharmaceutical funds at positions 7 and 10, and one look at their 1 year charts is enough to give you a good case of heartburn.
Continue reading
We are excited to be introducing a new interactive charting package for the New Year. For a while now we’ve been searching for new charting tools and finally found an interactive charting package we think fits the site. Our goals were modest. We wanted to be able to scroll through time and we wanted to be able to click on a bar and view the price data. 
We also like cross-hair scroll bars Continue reading
Last week I noticed a change in the Top Fund Groups table on the Home Page - Healthcare, Consumer Discretionary, and Consumer Staples groups were all among the top 5 shown. These industries are not normal leaders during a healthy market, in fact Healthcare and Consumer Staples are among the defensive industries. The obvious missing sector is Utilities, and as I write this it is in the number 6 slot and making a dash for the top five. This new look to the Top Five raised the question – How has the market performed when these industries lead?
Since this is an ETF site I wanted to look at it from that perspective, but ETF history is short. For this reason I decided to pick a Select Sector SPDR for each industry and compare relative RSf to future performance of the market (SPY). The three SPDR funds chosen were Consumer Discretionary(XLY), Consumer Staples(XLP), and Healthcare(XLV). The test period covered the 10 year span from the beginning of 2001 through end of 2010. This includes two bear markets, two recoveries, and the intermediate period.
Annualized Returns during Lead/Lag period.
The first test run was between Consumer Staples and Consumer Discretionary. This didn’t produce any results to get excited about, but things got more interesting when the RSf of these three sectors were compared to the RSf of SPY. As you can see in the chart to the right, the market Continue reading
This post introduces a new feature to the site – Price Alerts. This isn’t your basic simple price alert like your broker offers. Yes, you can enter a share price target as an alert, but you can also be alerted to price crossing above or below a moving average or a moving average crossing above or below another moving average. Also, if you prefer price retracements, you can set an x% retracement (up or down) from a point in time, and you will get an emailed alert when the retracement happens.
Several of you have requested something like this over the past few years, and we’ve been putting it off. Finally, we took your requests and built something around them. Alerts are built on top of Portfolios so you can easily create Alerts for one or more of your existing Portfolios. Or, if you create a special Portfolio for your Alerts, you still have all the functionality of standard Portfolios such as performance reports and screening. Continue reading
Well, it may not really be it’s debut since a good number of you have been using it for the past week, but The New Screener is now the default screener, the one you get to by clicking ‘Screener’ on the menu bar. There will probably be a few more problems found, given that one was found this morning, but I expect they will be minor.
If you have links saved to either of the two screeners they should still work.  At some point the older version of the screener will be discontinued but we will give people plenty of time to transition over before that happens. We’re in no hurry.
Have a nice weekend, and if you see something that’s not working right, or just needs to be changed, let us know.
Support for cross-overs and cross-unders has been added to the new screener. 
You can see from this image that a cross-over or cross-under is selected from the drop-down menu as easily as any other logic option.  The cross-under in the case shown is selecting those funds where today the price is below the 50-day SMA, but yesterday the price closed above. They only ‘select’ on the actual day of the cross, so this is distinctly different from filtering for price > or < and SMA.
But don’t just think about price and moving averages with crossovers. This could just as well be used to flag symbols where RSI-2 just crossed Continue reading
Now that the new screener is up and running, and people are exploring the performance of their favorite screens, I want to pass along a hint or two about developing screens that test well.  There will likely be a follow up post, or two, to this one so if anyone wants to comment or otherwise share some of their expertise please do so.
First and foremost, focus on the group of funds you start with. Most of us want to begin with all funds and let our filter rules and our sorting rules determine the best from the rest. That’s asking a lot from our simple rules, especially if we include a number of overlapping, highly correlated, funds.  So the first suggestion is to narrow your list down to the basics and let each fund represent it’s sector of the market solely.  Continue reading
The past few months we have been working on a new ETF Screening module to replace our current Screener. We have put this new module through many structured tests but it needs some real world usage, so we are inviting you to try it out here. After some testing (and I’m sure a few changes) this module will replace our existing Screener page.
The user interface will be familiar to you, but there are a few significant changes. First is the ability to screen from a portfolio, or other predefined group of funds. As the fund universe has grown with many overlapping funds, and brokerage firms have offered commission free trades on select funds, it has become more important than ever to do some initial screening of the fund universe. By beginning your screening process with a portfolio of funds, you are in control from the first step forward. Continue reading
Tomorrow, Nov. 9th, we will roll out revised ETF Performance and RSF Trends pages. Nothing real new with the data, just a continuation of the new look we introduced with the Moving Average pages a few weeks back. However, existing links will not work directly with the new pages due to the menu changes. They will be auto-converted and you will be given the option to continue to the new page. After that, you will probably want to save the new link to avoid the extra step. If you want a sneak peak you can take a look at the revised ETF Performance Page and maybe try out your saved links by changing ‘etfperf.php’ to ‘etfperf2.php’. The new RSF Trends page can be seen here.  The other performance pages will be updated later this week.
If you see any issues with these new layouts please let us know with a comment or an email.
Also, beginning tomorrow we will be updating data every 30 minutes during the trading day. This has been an issue for a while for some of you and we are glad to be able to add these additional updates due to your continued support. The schedule will begin with our current 9:55 am ET update and continue through 3:25 pm. Then we will have our regular 3:45 update prior to market close and our 4:16 update after market close. The nightly update will continue as it has, at about 10:30 ET.
Enjoy, and let us know what you would like to see. We have some changes coming for the Screener next.
Several of you have asked for an easy and straight forward way to get a list of funds above or below some moving average. This has always been available from the screener, but that was more cumbersome than it needed to be for this simple task. What has not been available is a list of funds Crossing-Over or Crossing-Under their moving average on a particular day. That is – until now! You are encouraged to check out our new Moving Average Comparison page, and let us know what you think.
In addition to the moving average data, I’d appreciate some feedback regarding the menu above the table. While similar to the one on other site pages, we have changed the Short Funds and Leveraged Funds selection options, per user request. The new menu does provide more selection with only two options, but might not be totally clear. Since we will soon be rolling out new versions of all the legacy tables on the site we would like to address an issue now rather than later.
We really value your input and your support.
