Individual Investors Seem to Gravitate to ETFs

May 14, 2008 at 3:00 pm by Tom Lydon      Bookmark and Share

45101827The stock rating system on the Motley Fool is slowly seeing exchange traded funds (ETFs) making up the top ten. And now, six of the top ten stocks are actually ETFs.

Before we proceed, CAPS is the Motley Fool’s rating system where investors work together and pool all their information to help you identify which stocks are the best to buy and when, along with which stocks to avoid.

Players rate stocks and predict which will under perform or outperform all the while The Fool keeps score and rates them. In turn, players receive ratings and based on the performance of their picks. The system is updated every five minutes, so the news is all current.

Todd Wenning for The Motley Fool gives us the top six ETFs as of May 13th, and reminds us that these are not formal recommendations, just start-ups to further your own research. In respective order:

  • iShares MSCI Canada Index (EWC), up 6.7% year-to-date
  • iShares MSCI Taiwan Index (EWT), up 10% year-to-date
  • iShares MSCI South Africa Index (EWA), up 6.7% year-to-date
  • SPDR S&P Emerging Middle East & Africa (GAF), up 1.5% year-to-date
  • iShares MSCI Sweden Index (EWD), up 5.5% year-to-date
  • PowerShares Global Water (PIO), down 6% year-to-date

It only underscores the popularity that ETFs have acquired with individual investors.

Wenning points out that some of the individual stocks in the ETF will outperform the ETF, but that’s the trouble: how do you choose which stock to go after? Hindsight is 20/20. By investing in ETFs, you remove picking and choosing from the equation.

For the month of April, we had ETF industry growth. Will it keep up?

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