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Best & Worst ETFs & Mutual Funds: Consumer Staples Sector

The Consumer Staples sector ranks first out of the ten sectors as detailed in my sector roadmap. It gets my Attractive rating, which is based on the aggregation of my ratings for 10 Consumer Staples ETFs and 9 Consumer Staples mutual funds as of April 12, 2012. Reports on the best & worst ETFs and mutual funds in every sector and style are on my blog and MarketWatch’s Trading Deck.
by David Trainer, Founder & CEO
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How To Avoid the Worst ETFs: April 2012

From the start, avoid any ETFs below a $100 million market cap. Anything smaller puts you at risk of inadequate liquidity, too large a bid/ask spread and tracking error. Even $100 million can be too low. The bigger the market cap the less trading risk. There are plenty of free services that allow you to screen out the smaller ETFs and minimize your trading risk. The focus of this article, however, is investing risk or the relative investment potential of the ETF.
by David Trainer, Founder & CEO
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Cutting Thru the Smoke in the Energy Sector

Two of the three stocks added to our large/mid cap Most Dangerous stocks list for November are from the energy sector. Those stocks are Energy XXI (Bermuda) Ltd. (EXXI) and Superior Energy Services (SPN) – both get my very dangerous rating as do all of the Most Dangerous stocks. All of the energy sec­tor ETFs get a dan­ger­ous rat­ing, which means you should sell them.
by David Trainer, Founder & CEO
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ETF Shoppers: Accounting Trickery At Its Worst In Financial Sector

There are 25 financial sector ETFs. Per Figure 1, these 25 ETFs have drastically different stock holdings and, therefore, allocations. The lowest number of holdings is 24 while the highest is 496. For starters, investors interested in the financial sector cannot expect many good investment options given that the sector gets my “dangerous” rating and ranks ninth out of the ten sectors that make up the economy. Details are in our sector roadmap report.
by David Trainer, Founder & CEO