The smartphone industry is facing a round of stiff competition. While individual companies fight it out, technology ETFs could be poised to benefit from the battle.

Apple’s (NasdaqGS: AAPL) iPhone may be threatened by Motorola’s (NYSE: MOT) Droid, a smartphone serviced on Verizon’s (NYSE: VZ) network and powered by Google’s (NasdaqGS: GOOG) Android 2.0 operating system, according to The Week.

Everywhere you look – maybe even in your own hands – you see some kind of teched-out cell phone. Now China will soon have the opportunity to distract itself with such smartphone devices as telecommunications companies, as well as related ETFs, benefit from an untapped consumer base.

China Unicom, the China’s second-largest carrier with 140 million subscribers, announced a three-year agreement to sell Apple’s (APPL) iPhone, which could make China’s markets account for 15% to 20% of global iPhone sales next year, writes Gregg Keizzer for ComputerWorld. Apple will face competition in China from other smartphone name brands such as Google’s (GOOG) Android operation system and BlackBerry devices from Research in Motion (RIMM).

Global sector ETF performance update for the close of August is below. Note that all ETFs are above the 200 day moving average. The top three at the end of August are IXG (financials), IXN (technology) and RXI (Consumer Discretionary). I have previously discussed some possible strategies using this data on my blog.

The momentum strategy that an investor could implement would be to purchase the best returning Global sector ETF(s) over the trailing 3, 6, and 12 months. This strategy has been written about extensively by Mebane Faber, author of The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets.

Here is a list of 73 exchange traded funds with at least $100 million market-cap, at least $1 million daily Dollar trading volume, and at least 3% annualized last dividend yield.

click image to enlarge

I decided to run an ETF screen over at FINVIZ.com for the following:

1) Yield > 4% (to give you perspective, a 10 year treasury bond yields around 3.79%)
2) Average Volume > 50k shares
3) Trading Above the 200 Day Moving Average

Global sector ETF performance update for the beginning of August is below. Note that all ETFs are above the 200 day moving average. The top three at the end of July are IXG (financials), MXI (materials), and IXN (technology). I have previously discussed some possible strategies using this data on my blog.

The momentum strategy that an investor could implement would be to purchase the best returning Global sector ETF(s) over the trailing 3, 6, and 12 months. This strategy has been written about extensively by Mebane Faber, author of The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets .

Excerpt from Raymond James strategist Jeffrey Saut's latest essay, published Monday (July 20th):

...[T]he stock market didn’t seem to care about such political agendas last week as the S&P 500 (SPX/940.38) tacked on another 7% to close the week around 940, thus negating the widely advertised head-and-shoulders “top formation” in the charts. The Weekly Waltz also left the SPX above its 10/30/50/200-day moving averages and in a position to challenge its June 11th closing high of 944.89. Bettering that level would suggest an attempt to achieve our long-standing target of 1050.

I gave an example earlier this week of a US sector rotation system using ETFs. This portfolio strategy uses the same rules, only with the iShares Global Sector ETFs. The momentum strategy that an investor could implement would be to purchase the best returning Global sector ETF(s) over the trailing 3, 6, and 12 months. This strategy has been written about extensively by Mebane Faber, author of The Ivy Portfolio.

I decided to use the results as of today's close, rather then June 30th like my previous post. The top 3 Global Sectors in order are IXN, RXI, and KXI. The full results are below:

Jim Cramer has popularized the statement, "There's always a bull market somewhere." That is an underlying concept for our approach to ETF investing. By maintaining a broad universe of choices, we are frequently able to move from one winning sector to another. When conditions are optimal, it is like finding the best wave and riding the crest.

Sometimes, however, the surf is not up. Sometimes our sector universe has positive ratings for only the inverse ETF's (ProShares Short S&P 500 (SH), ProShares Short Dow 30 (DOG), and ProShares Short QQQ (PSQ)). When this happens, as we noted last week, it is time to pay attention. Our TCA-ETF system is always looking for new opportunities. Since it acts not only on trends, but also on cycles, it may act more quickly than systems that rely strictly on trend. (For new readers, there is a more complete description of our methods and ratings at the end of the article.)

Right up my '70s alley, Blazing Saddles made "We don't need no stinking badges" popular. Yet it was the 1948 film, "The Treasure of Sierra Madre," that started it all. (At last, I can talk about being too young to remember an original!)

With the latest from Citi (C) and B of A (BAC), many people are thinking, "We don't' need no stinking financials." Investors have had it... and who hasn't?! Apparently, writers who lack curiosity... that's who!

Scores of big-name "value" managers in the mutual fund world are already making their individual stock picks. Marsico, Whitman, Miller – there’s no shortage of iconic players.

What about the world of index investing through ETFs? Are there bargains on broader based indexes that certain ETFs track?

iShares S&P Global Telecommunications Sector Index Fund (IXP) has slowly been gaining headway in our Sector Momentum Tracker ETF rankings in recent weeks, moving from the No. 30 position on November 18 to the No. 15 spot on December 26 as the fund bested the S&P 500 by 16.06% for the three-month period ending December 26. Year to date, IXP has beaten the benchmark index by nearly 6%, an outperformance that follows on the heels of a banner year in 2007, when the fund saw nearly 26% improvement in NAV.

While IXP’s assets have cascaded along with the broader market in 2008, the fund has shown some strengthening in recent weeks, with its NAV rising 3.47% for the month ending December 26. IXP seeks to track the S&P Global Telecommunications Sector Index, a subsector of the S&P Global 1200 Index. IXP’s index includes diversified telecommunications carriers and wireless communication companies. The country with the largest representation in IXP’s portfolio is the United States, composing 28.8% of holdings as of September 30, 2008, followed by the United Kingdom, with 13.43%, and Spain, with 10.29%.

It’s that time of year again. The time when market strategists emerge from the beleaguered investment banks to give you their best guesstimate on how high or how low the indexes will be by the end of the New Year. But should we be listening? After all they are all too happy to talk to us about the future while sidestepping the results of their previous year end forecasts in the most recent Outlook 2009 article. In an effort to justify the four foot stack of Barron’s on my living room floor, I intend to review the previous years’ prognostications given by the typical group of esteemed market strategists in Barron’s magazine.

Only five of the market strategists that participated in Barron’s Outlook 2009 participated in the Barron’s Outlook 2007 and the Barron’s Outlook 2008 printed in the corresponding December issues. The five strategists that have participated in each of the Outlooks from the past three years are from Deutsche Bank (DB), Citigroup (C), JP Morgan (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS). We will review the calls of only these five strategists since they are the only strategists with a history to evaluate. We will be looking at their S&P forecasts, sector picks and pans, 10 year treasury rate forecasts and fed fund target rate forecasts.

Is the sequence of financial bubbles dating back to Japan in the late 1980s, via Asia in the late 1990s, technology stocks at the turn of the decade and followed in recent years by an accelerating series of bubbles in real estate, credit risk and commodities, all symptomatic of a deeper underlying economic malaise, rather than just incompetent monetary policy and an excess of global savings?

The key fundamental drivers of sustainable prosperity are technical innovation and productivity growth, and their interaction over time. It was the utter failure of the Soviet system to sustain technical innovation and to boost stagnating productivity (notably in energy production) that presaged the sudden collapse of their system. Could we be facing a similar fate and simply running out of sustainable growth?

Click to enlarge

In addition to the previously mentioned dividend investing opportunities in tobacco stocks, the accompanying table includes the 10 largest companies by market cap among 74 total included in the ETF Innovators [ETFI] Global Telecom Services Dividend Index, which is comprised of companies with market caps over $1B U.S. Dollars and dividend yields of at least 2%.

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.)

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.