According to Thompson Reuters, comparable sales for retail stores open at least a year rose 3.3% in August, better than the 2.5% that was forecasted. Furthermore, it appears that this outperformance in the retail sector came at the expense of consumer savings rates, which dipped by 6% in August.

Analyst Kevin Grewal is founder, editor and publisher of ETF Tutor, and editor at SmartStops.net and the ETF Institute. Previously, he worked as an analyst at a small hedge fund.

Which single asset class are you most bullish (or bearish) about in the coming year? What ETF position would you choose to best capture that?

Eleanor Laise has found an interesting trend in the world of quant funds: a lot of them are looking much more human, these days.

Quants are seeking to win back investors not just with their characteristic number crunching but also with a bit of soul searching. Many of the funds’ managers are seeking to make their models a little more like people, by making them more responsive to changing circumstances. That can mean revisiting computer models more often, tweaking their components, or incorporating measures of macroeconomic risk rather than just stock-specific information.

Everyone talks about mania, they think of Hulk Hogan right? Well maybe it's just me, but M&A mania is picking up lately, and here's a little known way to play it.

So why does Moody’s (MCO) and S&P still have top ratings (AA3 and AAA) on various Harrisburg defaulted bonds? How are such top credit ratings even possible given Harrisburg’s obvious financial troubles. And most importantly, what impact does this have on investors of muni bond ETFs and closed end funds?

The bullish case seems to rest on two platforms: (1) August was really bad therefore September should be good in reaction to that, and (2) “Everyone” now expects the current crop of politicos to suffer major setbacks in November and, since the market is a predictive mechanism, investors are positioning themselves today for what they believe will be wonderful news post-November (like an extension of the current tax rates and a reduction in pork-barrel spending by irresponsible pols.)

The Short Term VIX futures ETN (VXX) has dropped to the lowest level since April, even though the volatility index it tracks is little changed in the last four weeks.

Barclays takes “dynamic indexing” to a new level with VQT. The underlying index can be dramatically reconfigured on a daily basis and employs a stop-loss mechanism. The underlying index seeks to provide broad U.S. equity market exposure with an implied volatility hedge. It will dynamically allocate investments among three components: equity (S&P 500 Total Return Index), volatility (S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Index), and cash.

I promise a more detailed analysis of VQT in the near future, but for now suffice it to say that the ETN essentially consists of a long position in the S&P 500 index, hedged with a volatility position (VXX) that varies daily, based on how the ETN evaluates volatility risk, largely using realized volatility and implied volatility calculations. The table below shows that the two main inputs into determining the VXX allocation are the current level of realized volatility and the direction of the implied volatility trend. The equity component of VQT is set to vary in a range of 60-97.5%, with the volatility component comprising the balance of the VQT at anywhere from 2.5-40%.

If so, I hope it waits at least a week to become manifest because the ETF Pullback model I introduced on Seeking Alpha a little more than month ago took me out of an aggressively cyclical posture and went primarily fixed income.

The new ETN, which is a type of unsecured, unsubordinated debt security, tracks the S&P 500 Veqtor Index, which provides broad equity market exposure with an implied volatility hedge by allocating between equity, volatility, and cash. The Index allocates assets among the S&P 500 Index, the S&P 500 Short-Term VIX Futures Index and cash. Furthermore, the ETN carries an expense ratio of 0.95%.

In the month of July, vacancies in apartment buildings, office complexes, retails malls and self-storage facilities showed no significant signs of rising indicating that the sector could be starting to stabilize. In fact, occupancy rates for apartment buildings are currently around 92 percent and around 84 for office buildings, much higher than a year ago. Additionally, rents on commercial properties are no longer falling and numerous real estate investment trusts, known as REITs, are reducing debt on their balance sheets.