Know The Components of Your ETFs

I really enjoy David Letterman and am not much of a Jay Leno fan. Maybe it is an East Coast / West Coast thing. Or maybe it’s because I was a real Johnny Carson fan and Letterman is cut from Carson’s mold. One of my favorite bits on Letterman is “Know Your Cuts of Beef.” In than spirit I have my own version today – Know Your Components of ETFs.

This comes out of a conversation with an old friend who from time to time will closely follow my recommendations. He asked me yesterday where I thought Google (GOOG) was going. I said I have a target of $750- $850. This is based on both a top down and bottom up analysis which I performed with my research team. My friend said that he owned the Internet HOLDRs (HHH), an ETF comprised of internet stocks. To his surprise, I informed him that GOOG was not represented in the HHH. I explained that HHH was mostly comprised of Ebay (EBAY), Amazon.com (AMZN), Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner (TWX). HHH was introduced and launched many years before GOOG came to market and is a fixed portfolio. Since he thought he had GOOG exposure but had none; he wanted to keep exposure to EBAY and YHOO; and, wanted to cut back on exposure to TWX, AMZN and the other residual stocks in the HHH comprising about 15% of the portfolio he immediately sold some (but not all) of his HHH and used the proceeds to buy GOOG.

The lesson - Know Your Components of ETFs.

Disclosure: At the time of this Blog entry Scott Rothbort, his family and or clients of LakeView Asset Management, LLC were long shares of GOOG --- although positions can change at any time.

Comments

[dslnbull]

ALIBABA.COM v/s TOOTOO.COM????? TOOTOO.COM is better then GSOL.COM according to report( Posted somewhere). TOOTOO.COM could be buy out target by GOOGLE, MSFT????/IS it possible????Yes, Yes...It can be IPO? I dont know but if ALIBABA worth 50 dollar then TOOTOO.COM worth at least half of ALIBABA. NEATEASE ceo bought 3 million shares of NINE. TOOTOO.COM owns by NINE.

[Tom B]

I'm puzzled: Alibaba? TOOTOO? Nine? I read a lot of investment stuff and I've NEVER heard of these. With these hokey names, I'm already thinking "pets.com", though. Sheesh!

[dslnbull]

Going vertical
I was having an interesting discussion this morning about who, if anybody, can challenge the Alibaba/Global Sources duopoly at the top of the Asian B2B tree. I look forward to receiving the calls from both of you saying that you can't be compared. The conversation will continue ladies and gentlemen.

EC21 is arguably sailing in the same ocean, although about a continent behind. Others like TradeEasy chug around in a much smaller pond.

No, the ones that catch my eye are those who are building strong positions in verticals. It's no coincidence in my opinion that Zhejiang Netsun had for a while (I haven't checked recently) the highest market cap of any stock on the Shenzhen stock exchange.

So, it caught my eye that those good folk at Ninetowns are pushing into verticals. Their tootoo.com has a cute name and is trying to compete with its quality rating scheme. But, it's interesting to seem them making some tactical purchases such as this Rmb5 million acquisition of 22% in Hangzhou Tophere Info-Tech Inc. The press release notes that:



Through its B2B website (www.21food.cn), Tophere has successfully conducted various trade transactions between domestic buyers and suppliers. Currently, Tophere employs approximately 80 full-time employees in China, and has approximately 1,000 paying members. In addition, Tophere has accumulated information of 149,000 food and beverage products available from over 136,000 Chinese suppliers.

copied from nine message board

[dslnbull]

With the B2G business at Ninetowns struggling, the company has been looking for other business opportunities. Considering Ninetowns current customer base of over 130,000 businesses involved in import/export transactions in China, a B2B business that leveraged this customer base was the obvious choice. In September of 2006, Ninetowns acquired a 16.25% interest in Global Market Group Limited, a Chinese B2B trade facilitator. Although this was a positive sign, this investment did not show investors that Ninetowns was fully committed to a strategy change to the B2B market place.

In late 2006, Ninetowns launched tootoo.com, its first full featured entry into the B2B marketplace. Although financial results have yet to be reported for tootoo.com, a look at the Alexa ranking shows that tootoo.com is experiencing significant traffic. Tootoo.com has a current Alexa rank of 2,045 compared to a rank of 2,098 for competitor Global Sources, 374 for MadeinChina.com, and 97 for Alibaba.com.

Although a high Alexa rank doesn’t necessarily translate into revenues and profits, the quick jump in traffic at tootoo.com does show that Ninetowns has the ability to leverage their current customer base.

A few weeks ago Ninetowns announced the next step in its B2B strategy. By acquiring Baichuan, a leading Chinese vertical search engine, Ninetowns plans to offer industry specific web search for suppliers and buyers engaged in Chinese international trade. In order to enhance the quality and relevancy of search results, Ninetowns plans to use the supplier verification technology from its existing iDeclare and iProcess service platforms.

The Baichuan acquisition allows Ninetowns to merge tootoo.com with Baichuan’s yaphon.com. Baichuan has entered into alliances with more than 30 Chinese B2B portals with access to 400,000 suppliers and 1.5 million products. Baichuan also introduced the Total Quality Sourcing (TQS) ranking algorithm to improve search result relevancy and quality. By combining TQS and Ninetowns supplier verification system, Ninetowns hopes to gain a competitive advantage over the competition by focusing its search results on companies that have passed multiple quality standards.

copied from yahoo message board

[User 44990]

do you know of any websites where you can look up a given stock and see what ETF's it is a member of..There are plenty of ways to look up the components of the ETF's but I do not know of any way to search by stock ticker???

Can you please email me at [e-mail] if you know the answer

Thanks

N

[Tom B]

How about Morningstar.com, at least to get the top 25 holdings?Another point to consider: look at expense ratios before buying ETF's (or mutual funds!).