The large-cap blend style ranks first out of the twelve fund styles as detailed in my Style Rankings for ETFs and Mutual Funds report. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 33 ETFs and 944 mutual funds in the large-cap blend style as of February 1st, 2013.
The all-cap growth style ranks fifth out of the twelve fund styles as detailed in my style rankings for ETFs and mutual funds. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of two ETFs and 490 mutual funds in the all-cap growth style as of October 17, 2012.
The best ETFs and mutual funds have high-quality holdings and low costs. As detailed in “A cheap fund is not always a good fund”, there are few funds that have both good holdings and low costs. While there are lots of cheap funds, there are very few with high-quality holdings.
None of the fund styles earn a rating better than Neutral. The primary driver behind the Neutral-or-worse ratings is poor portfolio management. My style ratings are based on the aggregation
MSFT gets my best rating because the company’s ROIC, at 72%, ranks 8th in the S&P 500 while its stock price (~$31.52/share) implies the company’s profits will permanently decline by about 20%. High profitability and low valuation create excellent risk/reward in a stock. Here is my free report on MSFT.
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.
The radically higher number of US equity mutual funds (4,700+) versus ETFs (380+) is not indicative of better stock selection from active management. On the contrary, the vast majority of actively-managed funds do not justify the higher fees they charge. They do not, in terms of stock selection and expected returns, add value versus passively managed benchmarks.
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.
I am not a smoker or tobacco user, and I do not like to be around smokers. However, that prejudice does not blind me from the fact that Lorillard, Inc. (LO) is a “very attractive” stock. I recommend investors buy it as well as the following ETFs because of their large allocations to LO and their attractive-or-better investment ratings...
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.
January’s Most Attractive Stocks are now available.
Technology and Pharmaceutical stocks predominate compared to other sectors. One newcomer to the list, Seagate Technology (STX), is actually an old friend. STX made