The large-cap growth style ranks second out of the twelve fund styles as detailed in my style roadmap. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings
First, you need to determine the category or sector to which you want exposure.
Then, you determine which ETFs, within the category or sector you like, are the best …this can be the hard part.
My ratings on ETFs are unique because they are based on my stock ratings for each of a fund’s holdings.
Analyzing and rating an ETF based on its holdings delivers many interesting insights:
Investors are good at picking funds with low costs. They are not good at picking funds with good stocks. Both are required to maximize opportunity for success.
The Large Cap Blend investment style ranks first out of the twelve investment styles as detailed in my style roadmap. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of fund ratings of all 1222 funds in the style.
Here is a free copy of our report on AAPL for Ask Matt readers.
AAPL gets our "Very Attractive" rating because its economic earnings are positive and rising, it has one of the highest returns on invested capital (ROIC) in the world. At the same time, it's stock price reflects very low expectations for future earnings growth.
Having too many choices can be intimidating. And there are definitely lots of choices when it comes to ETFs. For example, in the equity market alone, there 30+ technology sector ETFs, or 35 ‘large cap value’ and 20 financial ETFs. A very healthy selection abounds for every category of ETF.
The problem is that these ETFs are not made the same even though they may be in the same category. There are major differences in methodologies between funds, which results in drastically different holdings even within a given sector. See Figure 1.
The market decline experienced thus far is closer to its beginning rather then its end. Today’s refreshing market rise is likely just a flash in the pan.
The market needs to go down again before it can sustain any future rise.
The consumer staples and information technology sectors are tops among the ten major sectors. Both get our “attractive” rating. Our Sector Roadmap report ranks and rates all of the 10 sectors. It also benchmarks all sectors against the S&P 500, which gets our “neutral” rating and the Russell 2000, which gets our “dangerous” rating.
Yes, RIMM is losing market share and fast. Yes, RIMM’s Blackberry Playbook tablet is a dud. Yes, the stock has been a stinker recently. And yes, none of what I wrote at the beginning of this article would matter if the stock were not super cheap.
The worst is not over for Finisar Corporation (FNSR)’s stock. Despite dropping over 50% since March, the stock remains on our most dangerous stocks list, where it has been since October 2010.
Our top picks for ETFs for the Information Technology sector are: Internet Architecture HOLDRS (IAH) and Semiconductor HOLDRS (SMH). We also rate the investment merit of the top-12 tech sector ETFs.
Of the 561 technology stocks we cover, IDTI is one of the 77 that get our “very dangerous” rating and one of the few that make our most dangerous stocks list for January. The tech sector is tricky because there are several large-cap excellent stocks (MSFT, ADI and AAPL) that make the sector look very good and offer good hiding for some “very dangerous” smaller-cap stocks such as IDTI.