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.

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Here are the ten ETFs and ETNs with the largest increase in value traded (VT) for the week ending May 15, 2009. The ranking is based on a simple comparison of the five-day average value traded (closing price times volume) versus the 50-day average.

Topping the list this week is SPDR DJ Euro STOXX 50 (FEZ) with a 353% increase in value traded on a -6.3% drop in price. A quick scan of the table reveals that “distribution” was the name of the game this week, as eight of the listed products underwent price declines. Rydex S&P Smallcap 600 Pure Value (RZV), a recent market leader, suffered a -13% haircut.

Here are the ten ETFs with the largest increase in value traded (VT) for the week ending May 08, 2009.

The ranking is based on a simple comparison of the five-day average value traded (closing price times volume) versus the 50-day average.

Lately, CNBC has been squawking about how well bank stocks have been doing lately in anticipation of the stimulus package. Sure, many of them have rallied recently, but their charts for the most part hardly scream "buy!" As proxies for this group, look at the charts of the financial spider, the XLF, and the regional banking ETF, the RKH. (In the interest of saving space, I'm only showing the chart of the RKH, but the XLF chart is very similar.)

In times like these of financial uncertainty, regulated utilities have traditionally been considered a safe haven. But that is changing. The Dow Jones Utilities Average was down 30% in 2008, vs. a 34% drop in the Dow Industrials. Not much of a safe haven.

In a recent interview, utilities analyst Daniel Scotto noted, that the utility industry offers "a lot less security" than it used to. His reasoning is based mainly on the fact that the regulated portion of utility companies' business is smaller than it has been in previous recessions, making them vulnerable to lower growth (or even contracting) energy demand. Scotto forecasts electricity demand growth at "no more than 0.2% this year, and he sees a chance that the U.S. electric utility industry could experience negative growth for the first time since the 1950s.

Officially, U.S. electricity demand in 2009 is expected to be up about 1.2%. But well-known electric utility analyst Daniel Scotto’s own forecast is for demand growth to be no better than 0.2% this year. Moreover, Scotto told EnergyTechStocks.com in an exclusive interview that the U.S. electric utility industry could experience negative growth for the first time since the 1950s.

Revenue from commercial power users “is starting to collapse,” Scotto said, while industrial-customer revenue “is weakening.”

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.

Short selling has been a major topic on Wall Street lately, with the focus mainly on the short interest of individual stocks.  Below we highlight the US ETFs with the highest short interest as a percentage of shares outstanding as well as the ones with the highest short interest ratios. 

The most heavily shorted ETFs have short interest numbers that well exceed their shares outstanding.  The S&P Retail ETF (XRT) has a short interest figure that is more than 6 times its shares outstanding.  This seems a bit out of whack to us. 

Costs associated with new emission controls and updating of an aging infrastructure pose a long-term threat to the outlook for US electric power companies, according to a new industry analysis from Moody’s.

The US investor-owned electric utility sector’s rating outlook remains stable, but credit quality could deteriorate if companies don’t strengthen their balance sheets to withstand rising business and operating risks, Moody’s says in its latest six-month update for the sector.

Currently, just 14% of stocks in the S&P 500 are trading above their 50-day moving averages.  While this is extremely oversold, the number got down to 8% last August and 11% in January.

Financials and Industrials are the sectors struggling the most.  Each of them have just 2% of stocks trading above their 50-days.  Consumer Discretionary isn't far behind at 5%, however.  The two sectors that look the best at the moment are Health Care and Utilities.  Health Care has 42% above their 50-days, while the Utilities sector sits at 39%.

As Power Industry Gets Facelift, Perhaps Utility ETFs Might As Well

The United States has an aging power grid, and efforts to bring it into modern times could benefit utility ETFs.

The target is for electric power providers to spend $17 billion on upgrades by 2010, reports Steve Gelsi for MarketWatch. The alternative, if the industry doesn’t start making improvements, is increased blackouts and power-quality problems.

Each week we gather some technical analysis statistics on the overall stock market and in particular the S&P 500. This week's post provides some insight into the continued deterioration of the S&P 500 and the performance of the various industry sectors represented in the index.

The following chart is for the week ending June 6, 2008. It gives a breakdown of the industry sectors and the results of running a number of technical indicators on the stocks in each sector. (Click charts to enlarge.)

The International Energy Agency provides a sobering analysis of the challenges the world faces in reducing its from dependence on oil and reducing carbon emissions, in its latest biennial analysis Energy Technology Perspectives 2008.

“If governments around the world continue with policies in place to date – the underlying premise in the ETP Baseline scenario to 2050 – CO2 emissions will rise by 130% and oil demand will rise by 70%. This expansion in oil equals five times today’s production of Saudi Arabia,” the report notes.

A reader asks the following;

Most U.S. interest rates are now below the current rate of inflation, i.e. we have negative real yields. I know you often speak of what the text book says, but does it say anything about what is the usual best of action in this situation of negative real yields, with particular reference to income? Do you go with shorter maturities? Longer? Shun utilities? Overweight gold/commodities etc.?

Utilities have a history of good dividend returns and safety. It is not true, as some people claim, that utilities are immune from downturns in a sinking market, but they are less likely to fall precipitously under adverse economic conditions.

Surprisingly, public utilities offer value, profit, and reliability when the market is at its worse. Roger Conrad’s Utility Forecaster of January, 2008 (www.utilityforecaster.com) presents an extensive menu of high-yield utilities. He says, in their favor: “Utility stocks haven’t gone straight to the moon in five years. But they’ve come pretty close: The index of 20 electric utilities traded on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange tripled from late-2002 lows and are 50 percent above their 2000 peak.” Many, in fact, are trading at their 52-week highs.

Hickey and Walters (Bespoke) submit: Now that second quarter earnings season has passed, investors have begun to look at what the third quarter has in store, especially since many companies will be affected by the recent turmoil in credit markets. Below we highlight the 4-week percentage change in third quarter earnings estimates by sector.

As shown, there have been cuts in estimates recently, but not by much. Financials, who have been the most directly impacted, have seen their third quarter estimates fall by just 1.35% in the last month - even less than the Utilities sector.

Jeremy Grantham has recently written that the “third great investing opportunity of his career” is to be “anti-risk” in the current market.

In the parlance of finance, risk and volatility are synonymous. What does Grantham mean by “anti-risk”? When markets are running at high returns and low volatility, as we have seen over the past several years, this implies that investors are becoming complacent about the risks that they are taking on. As a whole, investors are simply buying and buying (driving prices up) but there is little concern about the risks associated with the assets—hence the low volatility. If investors simply shrug off risks or bad news, market volatility will be low, as we have seen. In this environment, the spread between the returns that investors require for taking on low-credit-quality assets (i.e. relatively high probability of default) vs. high-credit-quality assets shrinks. Basically, investors are busily snapping up assets with little regard for risk of default or other risks of poor performance. In this type of market, investors tend to show a relatively high preference for riskier assets because these assets deliver higher returns and investors are simply discounting the risks.

Claymore Super Sector ETFs
Claymore/Morningstar Information Super Sector Index ETF (MZN)
Claymore/Morningstar Services Super Sector Index ETF (MZO)
Claymore/Morningstar Manufacturing Super Sector Index ETF (MZG)

Global Utilities ETFs
iShares S&P Global Utilities Sector Index Fund (JXI)
SPDR FTSE/Macquarie Global Infrastructure 100 ETF (GII)

Hickey and Walters (Bespoke) submit: Below is a recap of sector performance, both from the second quarter and year to date.

Energy, Technology and Industrials were the top performing sectors in the second quarter.