As has been discussed here before, I was a huge Barchart fan and user for many years before I started writing here. That’s due to the fantastic technical analysis and data tools here, which I’ve continued to absorb in a gluttonous fashion since I started contributing here.
Whether it’s the Interactive Charts, Watchlists, Custom Views, Barchart Opinion, or – well, I could go on – the time I’ve saved and the efficiency the site has brought to my own investing has been more than noticeable. I can literally put a “price” on it in terms of my time. It is on the way to being life-changing.
And that was part of the intellectual lightning strike I referenced earlier.
As context, I’m known around these parts as the “resident ETF guy,” a label I wear proudly. I’ve analyzed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for the purpose of making active investment decisions since I first started managing other people’s money, back in 1993.
That was the same year researching active and passive mutual funds expanded to ETFs. That’s when SPY, the first ETF, debuted. (They grow up so fast!)
So how did renting Jim’s investing version of a family car for two weeks spark a revelation?
Well, somewhere along the road from Chart of the Day column #1 and column #11 that I submitted last month, it hit me.
Even though I’ve been more ETF and macro-focused here, let’s face it: equity ETFs are just baskets of stocks. So the entire time I’ve been scouting ETFs, the underlying stocks were right there.
My preference as an investor is already to think of ETFs as “the stocks I’d like to own, but with some friends around them.” In the process of guest editing for Jim, a question wormed its way into my brain and never left:
If you’re a technician or a quant, and you want to make the case to yourself to own or not own an ETF, how can you not inherently be “grading” the top 5-10 stock holdings at the same time?
Most ETFs are market cap-weighted, after all.
So from there, it’s just a matter of drilling down on your individual process for…
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