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Saturday, January 3, 2009

Exchange Traded Funds (ETF)

Here are four charts that might be examples of what I would be tracking at once.

This first is the Horizons BetsPro S&P/TSX Capped Energy Bear Plus ETF for last Friday afternoon trading. This tracks the TSX capped energy index inversely.


This second chart is the same period for the Bull version of the fund as it tracks the energy index directly. Note that the price is not in the same range.

This is the S&P/ TSX Capped Energy Index itself.


This last chart is Suncor Energy.




The correlation of Suncor and the TSX Energy index is more obvious when looked at in better detail but the pattern is pretty obvious.

The volume of the two ETFs is substantially lower than SU. The volume is not a factor in the ETF's though as they are tracked to the index with some variance due to the bid/ask spread of the ETF. I need to watch these ETFs to see how they behave and it will be different trying to trade a derivative that is not driven by the traders trading it directly.

It is worth noting that ETF's can be traded using all the normal order types available to use with regular stocks, limits, stops, shorts, probably VTSOs and I understand that there are even options on these as well...although I don't anticipate using those.

There are a number available for most of the popular indices, gold, natural gas, oil, financial etc.

Jeff.

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