With the first quarter almost in the books, the S&P 500 will head into Monday with a gain of barely more than 1%. Given the start to the year for U.S. stocks, that performance could have been worse. Then again, after last year’s 32.3% gain for the benchmark U.S. index, investors were likely expecting a better start to 2014.
As is the case in every quarter, some ETFs have impressed and some have not. Here, we’ll take a look at some of the first quarter’s worst laggards, only of the non-leveraged variety.
A couple of notes about this list. First, investors will likely notice a distinctly international tilt in the following group. Second, volatility products, two of which rank among the quarter’s 10 worst exchange traded products, were excluded from this list.
Finally, in the case of single-country ETFs tracking the same nations, we condensed some of these funds into one spot on the list where all of the relevant funds will be highlighted. And that is a good segue to starting with the…