Below, we’ve created a table showing the performance of the different country ETFs.
Over the last month the best performing country has been Thailand, followed by Argentina, both with small gains. The worst performing stock market has been Russia, with losses of nearly 15%. Looking at the one year performance numbers, New Zealand saw the best performance, quickly followed by that of the U.S. The worst showings came from Egypt and Vietnam, both with nearly 50% drops.
The market may be rising, but at least one indicator is sending a strong warning signal. The TED spread, rather than declining as the market rose since the beginning of October, has continued to climb steadily higher.
While some may write this off as only one single indicator sending a negative signal, we think that there are strong grounds to pay attention to the TED spread. The risk to the world economy from European government debt problems is largely a function of whether the large banks that have exposure to the risky debt fail. The TED spread, showing the difference between what rate banks are lending to each other and the short term treasury bill rate, is a good proxy for the tensions in the credit markets. If the TED spread is rising, than we can see that banks are becoming increasingly reluctant to lend to each other.
Following the FOMC announcement, long term treasuries took off. The iShares Barclays 20 + Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) ended the day with a gain of 3.31%, putting it 5th on the short list of days with 3%+ rises. Below we’ve highlighted the one week performance of TLT following such instances.
It’s been way too long since we’ve last updated our roll yield and momentum tables. In addition, Teucrium just launched three agriculture ETFs, two of which are firsts for the commodities they track, wheat and soybeans. So below we’ve updated the table with rankings of roll yield, momentum, and a combination of the two.
The latest NAAIM sentiment index data is out, and while the median and average are still both below 30, what’s interesting is that the average rose, while at the same time the median dropped. Because this isn’t a very rare occurrence, happening 19 times since the beginning of the NAAIM data, we thought it would be interesting to look at the performance of the S&P following these instances .
