Displaying items by tag: ETFs

Did you know that most advisors spend 5.5 hours per week handling investment management related tasks like searching for funds? That stat comes from Kitces.com and does a good job highlighting what has become an increasingly difficult problem for advisors: how to find the right funds when there is an ever-increasing ocean of options, including many that look very similar. Between screeners with limited criteria (I want “value ESG”, not just “value”) and the pain of cross-asset class searches, finding funds has increasingly become a real quagmire for time and effort. Imagine if you could have three extra hours per week to focus on new client acquisition instead of cycling through drop-down menus trying to find funds? Well, a company called Magnifi has a great new tool to help you do just that. For example, international stocks are getting some attention from Wall Street analysts right now because of their favorable valuations versus US stocks. However, finding the right international funds is even harder than doing so for domestic stocks. For example, you might want to find the best ETFs focused on Asia. Because of the antiquated architecture of existing fund screeners, it would take hours of work to pin down funds in the right fee range and with the right composition. Instead, Magnifi uses natural language search to immediately display and compare all the relevant funds for your query. For example, here are the results for searching “China Value Funds”.

Another great thing about Magnifi is that they incorporate FI360’s fiduciary risk score for every fund, allowing you to incorporate that element for clients and rest easy with concern to regulations.

FINSUM: In our view, Magnifi is the best way to search and filter investments, period. Once you try it out you will quickly move on from the many ETF “screeners” available.

(New York)

Now that many signs are pointing to an improving US economy, some investors think it is time to shift out of growth stocks and into more cyclical sectors. That said, cyclicals—which rely on consumer spending improvements—are going to be a hard place to invest because of the highly variable recovery path for different sectors created by COVID. With that in mind here are a few places to look: transportation (excluding airlines), such as the iShares Transportation ETF (IYT); or infrastructure, like the Global X Infrastructure Development ETF (PAVE); ecommerce and home entertainment, such as the Amplify Online Retail ETF (IBUY); or housing, either through single names like Home Depot and Lowe’s, or a broader homebuilders ETF like the SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF (XHB).

FINSUM: We find homebuilding to be a very interesting opportunity. One of the reasons that the real estate market has held up is that homebuyers are typically those higher on the socio-economic ladder, whose incomes are much less likely to have taken a hit from the pandemic. Therefore, the growth trajectory for that whole sector looks strong.

(Washington)

Many articles have been written about which stocks and sectors will do well or poorly if Trump or Biden wins/loses. Generally speaking, these articles are useful but repetitive. A more interesting idea is to look at the sectors/assets that will do well no matter who wins. With that in mind, here are a few ETFs poised to thrive when either candidate emerges victorious. One surprising area that should prosper in either scenario is clean energy. Biden plans to invest heavily in the area, but even if he does not win, this group of companies have finally become profitable. Couple that with rising pro-green public sentiment, and their long-term outlook is positive. Another area is infrastructure stocks. Both Biden and Trump have big infrastructure spending plans in their agenda ($1.3 tn vs $1 tn), so that appears to be a win-win.

FINSUM: Just as there are winners in either situation, there are also losers. Pharma, for instance, would be under attack in either presidency.

(New York)

In what seems one of the most predictable outcomes of the Coronavirus pandemic, asset managers have decided to pounce and launch virus-specific ETFs. Pacer ETFs has just launched the Pacer BioThreat ETF (ticker: VIRS, of course), which tracks a custom index which follows “U.S.-listed stocks of companies that help protect against or recover from biological threats to human health based on a proprietary, multi-step research process”. Other providers, such as EQM, are doing the same.

FINSUM: This is not as gimmicky as it sounds. Companies that have businesses that benefit from coronavirus are going to be a sustained investment focus for some time.

(New York)

Markets are in a very rough place right now, with benchmark indexes approaching bear market territory on Monday. Energy and travel have been the epicenter of losses, but every sector s getting hit badly. With that in mind, what is the best sector to invest in right now? The answer may be—somewhat surprisingly—financials, and XLF in particular. Whereas the S&P 500 as a whole was in the 99th percentile of valuations historically before the big fall, financials were only in the 60-70% range. Now with the big tumble in prices, financials are in the bottom 1% of their ten-year valuation range.

FINSUM: So rates and yields are super low, which obviously hurts banks’ net interest margin and has led to financial stocks getting pummeled. However, they are so cheap that this is a very good long-term entry point.