The push for cleaner air and more fuel-efficient forms of energy has put the entire energy sector on investors’ radar. Everything from green energy, clean coal and the push for natural gas has ETFs primed and ready.

Every well-diversified portfolio needs some allocation to energy, and equity-based ETFs offer investors exposure to large energy giants to small pioneering companies, all wrapped up in a single package. Don Dion for TheStreet shows us how to play energy with ETFs:

Unleveraged Oil and Gasoline ETFs and ETNs

• iPath S&P GSCI Crude Oil Total Return Index ETN (OIL)
• PowerShares DB Oil Fund ETF (DBO)
• PowerShares DB Crude Oil Long ETN (OLO)
• United States Gasoline Fund, LP ETF (UGA)
• United States United States Heating Oil Fund, LP ETF (UHN)
• United States Oil Fund, LP ETF (USO)
• United States 12 Month Oil Fund, LP ETF (USL)

Leveraged Long Oil ETFs and ETNs

ETFs are intended for creating a low-cost and diverse portfolio regardless of which type of investor you may be. Here’s a breakdown of the various categories you can consider.

For every portfolio need, there is an ETF to fill it. Whether you’re looking in a niche area of the market or need an all-encompassing broad-based fund. Here is a simple breakdown from Aaron Levitt on Investopedia to help get you started.

By Lara Crigger

As readers of HardAssetsInvestor.com know, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission spent all summer pushing for tighter regulation of commodity ETFs, which the agency blames (rightly or wrongly) for running up energy prices last year.

Over the last 10 trading days, the ETFs with the best price breadth included financial segments (e.g., insurance, real estate, etc.) as well as commodity companies. Over the last 250 trading sessions (i.e., 1 year), however, the ratio of net advancers to net decliners was most favorable to broad-based energy and/or oil exploration. Financial ETFs over 250 days actually had more net decliners than net advancers.

What might different short- and long-term trends be telling us about the market’s strength? For one thing, if the cumulative totals of advancing-declining stocks in the financial ETFs are an effective gauge, then financial stocks are not free from the muck. The shorter-term A/D line for financial ETFs may be moving up, but the long-term A/D Line is still down.

“You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It is the language of business and it’s an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting – how to read and interpret financial statements – you really shouldn’t select stocks yourself.” - Warren Buffett

Either oil is overpriced or natural gas is undervalued. For hedge, you might want to short United States Oil (USO) and long United States Natural Gas (UNG). But I don’t think NG price will stay in $3.5 - $4 range for long, even though there are plenty of supply, floats of inventories and lots of economic uncertainty. Below chart shows future price for NYMEX Henry Hub Natural Gas ( source: shttp://futures.tradingcharts.com/marketquotes/index.php3?market=NG_). As you can see, Dec 2009’s price is $5.43.

People try to diversify among different asset classes to provide portfolio protection during down times. However, this financial crisis disappointed many investors, because almost all assets went down together.

The unexpected acceleration of job losses sent the broader U.S. market down by more than 2%... right out of the gate. Moreover, the growth sector ETFs experienced the sharpest smackdowns.

The consumer discretionary barometer, SPDR Retail (XRT), was down -4.2% by mid-trading-day 7/2/09. Similarly, SPDR Homebuilders (XHB) felt a painful -3.7% sting.

Back in November 2008, I wrote an article about what appeared to be a substantial disconnect in the way that options of individual stocks were being priced. This was due to the very high level of fear in the market. This anomaly was most easily exploited by selling options. In June of 2009, I wrote an article looking at how well this strategy had worked out. In this article, I look at the very different options opportunities that exist today. The anomalies that existed in late 2008 have largely disappeared, but there are a range of other opportunities that look substantial. In describing the market opportunities in options, this article introduces some more sophisticated concepts in options valuation and trading.

Today, VIX stands at around 28. The implied volatility of long-dated options on SPY (December 2010 and December 2011) is 27%-28%. VIX measures the implied volatility of options expiring soon. What this means is that the options market is suggesting that volatility is stabilizing at a value of around 27%-28%. This level of volatility is almost twice the long-term average for the S&P 500 (which is around 15%) but is far lower than levels of late 2008.

Many investors are somewhat dazed and befuddled as they watch what used to be called "The Natural Resources Sector" bounce up and down as the summer season commences.

With the dollar up again, commodities including the precious metals and oil were off sharply yesterday. All in all, it was just a broadly negative day. Little was spared, including equities, which also took a serious hit.

By Brandon Clay

With the dollar cratering and commodity prices climbing (almost) like it’s 2007, stock investors are showing more and more interest in the natural resource related sectors. Yes, it is now possible through various ETFs and ETNs to get direct exposure to many commodity markets, but stocks are more fun. Stocks have stories. And, at least sometimes, they go up even faster than the stuff they pull out of the ground.

Claymore Securities is looking to expand and it has filed for three new actively managed commodity equity ETFs.

The new Claymore funds will be all equity-based, writes Lara Crigger for Hard Assets Investors. They will have 80% of their constituent stocks picked out by using traditional qualitative methods from Delta Global Advisors. Delta Global will pick companies with $400 million market cap or more, and use a “top-down approach to global markets and infrastructure-related sub-sectors” and a “bottom-up approach to individual companies.”

In my previous post, we discussed the recent move by the FOMC to buy $300 Billion worth of long-dated treasuries along with $750 billion worth of agency obligations. “B-52 Ben” is flooding the economy with cash and the potential for an extremely inflationary environment is building. Please use the link above to view the background theory as today’s article deals more with the practical steps necessary to survive and even thrive in this environment.

So without further introduction, here are some portfolio steps you can take to build profits in the face of a falling dollar:

Excerpt from Raymond James strategist Jeffrey Saut's latest essay, published Monday (January 12th):

...[T]he tone seemed to change last Wednesday when ADP Employer Services reported that 693,000 private sector jobs were lost in December. They also revised November’s job loss number upward to 476,000 from a loss of 250,000 jobs. Since we pay more attention to the direction of revisions than we do to the actual headline numbers, this revision was disturbing.

We all know what bubbles look like, particularly after they burst. But how do we judge a bubble before it is obviously over? Many have speculated that the time is close, if not already here, to short treasuries.

This is the Third Quarter 2008 edition of our ongoing hedge fund tracking series. Before reading this update, make sure you check out the preface to the series we're doing on Hedge Fund 13F's here. We've already covered:

• Timothy Barakett's Atticus Capital
• Whitney Tilson's T2 Partners
• Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital
• Bill Ackman's Pershing Square
• Bret Barakett's Tremblant Capital
• John Paulson's Paulson & Co
• David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital
• Dan Loeb's Third Point
• Paul Tudor Jones' Tudor Investment Corp.
• Louis Bacon's Moore Capital Management

Next up is Bruce Kovner's Caxton Associates. The $10 billion firm is one of many global macro oriented funds which we cover. This is a switch from some of the more value oriented funds we've been covering, like the 'Tiger Cub' funds including Stephen Mandel's Lone Pine Capital, Lee Ainslie's Maverick Capital, John Griffin's Blue Ridge Capital, and Andreas Halvorsen's Viking Global.

When the market starts to move, there are always interesting patterns in the sector ETF's. Looking at the charts of various sectors provides market "feel." The ratings from our TCA-ETF model (Trend, Cycle, and a touch of Anticipation) help to draw attention to the big moves.

Even though the major averages declined over the course of the last week, the model picked up some interesting opportunities. Our sector ratings recommended dumping the inverse ETF's and also highlighted some new opportunities. The resulting changes had us better prepared for yesterday's "Obama rally." (For new readers, there is a more complete description of our methods and ratings at the end of the article.)

In addition to the disappointing close in the U.S. equity markets yesterday, there was also a renewed breakdown in the prices of many commodities. Due to their leverage as catalysts to Potash Corp. (POT), Alcoa (AA), and Freeport-McMoRan (FCX), in this post I’m focusing in on wheat, aluminum, and copper.

Wheat

At the start of November of 2007, I published an analysis in which I provided outlooks for a series of sector ETFs . The projections were generated using Quantext Portfolio Planner (QPP). That analysis suggested that most major asset classes were due for a substantial reversion to the mean—downwards. In particular, the worst looking asset classes were emerging markets (EEM), developed international markets (EFA), and telecom (IXP).

One of the strongest results from that analysis was a back-of-the-envelope calculation that suggested that most major asset classes would need to under-perform TIPS (TIP) for the next three years in order to bring long-term returns into equilibrium. The asset classes that were projected to under-perform TIPS in this approach included the S&P500 (both market cap weighted (IVV) and equal weighted RSP, EFA, EEM, IDU (utilities), RWR (REITs), and a number of other major sectors. Given that TIPS have a much lower risk level than any of these broad asset classes/sectors, an investor might logically have chosen TIPS in preference to any of these asset classes.