The XTF product has a structural integrity analysis that can be used to give a good overview of the trading efficiency of an ETF. The Structural Integrity analysis consists of the following seven factors:

Nevertheless, on 3/10/10, I identified 2 ETFs with unusually high trading volume. What’s more, each of the ETFs had money flows moving counter to the price change.

Yet investors have been cheering Canada on for years with iShares MSCI Canada (EWC) outperforming the S&P 500 SPDR Trust (SPY) in the previous decade. In other words, the decade may not have been entirely “lost” for those who ventured north of the border.

The traditional name is “Renko” charts, which was translated into English as “brick”.

Given the relatively weak correlation with other asset classes, commodities have found a home in many investors’ portfolios. Moreover, unprecedented injections of liquidity into the financial system have created anxiety over a coming uptick in inflation that could erode returns to stocks and fixed income instruments. Commodities have historically served as an effective inflation hedge, and many are once again turning to natural resources to protect assets from a surge in the CPI.

Below, we profile five facts about HOLDRS every investor should know before making an investment:

Matt Hougan assumes that markets trade smoothly from one point to the next and that investors can take their place in an orderly queue to get out of positions if things start to go wrong.

Despite The Wall Street Journal’s worries about Build America Bonds, they can be great for your portfolio, especially if you’re not super-wealthy.

Notably, Consumer Discretionary continues to rise in the rankings at the expense of Information Technology. One might think that they would move in the same direction since they are both cyclical in nature, but the main difference is that InfoTech is more heavily dependent on business spending while Consumer Discretionary (by definition) is tied to consumer spending. In any case, they continue to diverge in our rankings – this time in the opposite direction to how they were scoring last month.

While some of the rebound is likely due to a slight increase in the confidence of an economic recovery, many gaming investors are betting on emerging Asian consumers to help lift up the profits for many of the stocks included in this fund. Furthermore, as states find themselves in increasingly difficult budget situations, they are turning to expanded gambling operations as a way to dig themselves out of massive budget holes.

The SPDR S&P Retail exchange-traded fund (XRT), which we discussed a week ago when it broke above resistance levels, is already nearly halfway to its potential target at the $42 area.

The three new ETFs are Claymore Wilshire 5000 Total Market ETF (WFVK), Claymore Wilshire 4500 Completion ETF (WXSP), and Claymore Wilshire US REIT ETF (WREI). If these sound to you like clones of existing ETF products, then you are not alone. Claymore is marketing them as access to the “pure and complete” indexes from Wilshire. However, the Wilshire indexes and Dow Jones Total Market indexes are essentially duplicates of each other.