The U.S. markets dipped 10% in the second quarter, and investors aren’t all that happy about the dismal data on jobs, home sales, retail sales and consumer sentiment. But man believe that exchange traded funds (ETFs) may be an investor’s best bet in today’s volatile markets.
David Elan, a principal at Windward Investment Management, believes that ETFs are the best vehicle to acquire diversification across broad indexes while hedging against against increased market volatility, writes David Bogoslaw for BusinessWeek. Elan argues that ETFs provide fast access to cash for those who want to change allocations quickly.
Traditionally, ETFs track a chosen underlying benchmark index and try to reflect the market capitalization weighting within the benchmark. Over the past couple of years, the indexes have largely beaten actively managed funds. While most are still passively managed, ETFs also use weighting systems other than market cap such as revenue, dividends, or earnings in a portfolio’s make-up, which helps it beat a market-weighted index. [How to Survive Trendless Markets.]
For example, RevenueShares offers six funds that each passively track an index but rebalances once a year based on revenue weight. The funds offered hold the same stocks as their benchmarks but in varying concentrations as dependent on how low a stock’s price-to-sales ratio is. RevenueShares President Sean O’Hara points to how historic data has shown that higher stock multiples indicate lower return expectations. [Hope for ETF Investors? What History Says.]