One of my favorite things about writing for Barchart is sharing my decades of experience using exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in investment portfolios. Stock-pickers are everywhere. But as the markets continue to merge into one massive risk-on, risk-off trade, it gets tougher to identify ETFs that truly are unique enough to matter.
I can point to 100 ETFs that essentially move up and down with the broad stock market but have different names to make us think they are different. So when I do identify one I think can be useful in accentuating something going on in a stock market segment, I try to point it out here. Elon Musk Said Tesla Short Sellers Would Be 'Obliterated' Even Bill Gates — Yet They've Made $9 Billion This Year Shorting the Stock Applied Materials Stock Is Down on Earnings.
Here's What Barchart Options Data Says Could Come Next for AMAT. Sergey Brin Wants Google to Double Down on Gemini. What That Means for GOOGL Stock.
Tired of missing midday reversals? The FREE Barchart Brief newsletter keeps you in the know. That's the case with the FT Nasdaq Aba Community Bank Fund (QABA), which I've come to know over its 17-year lifespan as a play on bank consolidation.
It owns stocks of more than 150 community banks — the ones that are the most frequent targets of the big money center and regional banks when they are on the hunt for acquisitions. If you have been around as long as I have, you have seen several bank cycles — the consolidation into fewer companies, followed by a frustration with too much "bigness," which leads to more entrepreneurial community banks popping up to fill the void. Sometimes, they're started by the same executives who sold out to the big guys a few years earlier and have allowed their non-compete agreements to expire.
More recently, bank equities staged a nice recovery following the historic banking distress of 2023. That's when, for a short time, it appeared many smaller banks were going to go bust. The rumors were worse than the news.
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