Posts Tagged ‘relative’

ETF and Relative Strength Investing

April 29th, 2010

We wrote about Relative Strength Investing (RSI) a couple of weeks ago. We are currently developing a system that uses Relative Strength Investing to help us decide which sectors or countries leading the market. We will disclose the detail about this system in our future posting. What we can say now, it is our hobby project; and we are doing it in our spare time.

Today, we tried to run our RSI system against our ETF database. Here is the list of ETFs that are leading the market in the last 5 days.

1 day TAN: +5.72%
ICF: +4.6%
RWR: +4.54%
2 day ICF: +4.98%
VNQ: +4.83%
RWR: +4.74%
3 day GDXJ: +2.65%
XBI: +1.99%
IHF: +1.84%
4 day ICF: +2.4%
RWR: +2.32%
VNQ: +2.29%
1 week GDXJ: +4.35%
ICF: +3.96%
VNQ: 3.64%

Note that we only choose ETFs with the following criteria:

  • average volume at least 100K daily
  • no leveraged ETF is included

As you can see, TAN is leading the market today with +5.72% increase. For those who don’t know, TAN is an ETF that invests in solar-cell related companies.

If we go back to 2 days range, we can see that ICF is leading the market with a total of +4.98% increase. ICF is an ETF that invests in large and liquid REIT (Real Estate Income Trust).

Based on a table like above, we can see which sectors or countries are leading the market. For example, we can easily identify that REIT dominates the market this week.

Beating the Market with Relative Strength Investing

March 20th, 2010

We discussed about passive investing or index investing in our previous posting. The idea is to stay invested with the index. Why? Many people have tried to beat the index, such as S&P 500, but they couldn’t.

How can we beat the index? Some people use market timing to buy low and sell high. Many end-up by buying high and selling low. Some other people use stock picks, just like us, to buy the best stocks and hope that it will beat the index.

There is a strategy called Relative Strength Investing. We read about this strategy in Gerald Appel’s book, Technical Analysis: Power Tools for Active Investors. For those who don’t know, Gerald Appel is the creator of technical indicator MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence). We are using MACD extensively in our trading activities.

How does Relative Strength Investing work? It works like betting in a race track. First, we start betting on any horses. After first turn, we change our bet to the horse leading that time. If our horse is still leading, then we hold our bet. After second turn, we change our bet again to the leading horse. The idea is that we always stay with the leader. Gerald suggested that we use no-load mutual funds to apply this strategy. The basic principles are:

  • Identify the leaders
  • Buy the leaders
  • Hold the leaders as long as they lead.
  • When the leaders slow down, sell them and buy new leaders.

You can read the detail of this strategy in his book. He also shows how the performance of the strategy compared to S&P 500.

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