The end of July saw stocks finish in the red across the board as
decent personal income and Chicago PMI numbers weren't enough to
offset more uncertainty from
Europe, the Fed
, and crucial job numbers on Friday. In terms of sectors, oil and
services were big losers along with utilities, while some health
care, smaller energy names, and big tech held up rather well on the
session.
Thanks to these performances, the Dow finished the day lower by
0.5% while the S&P 500 lost 0.4% on the session. Meanwhile, the
Nasdaq, buoyed by a strong performance from Apple, finished lower
by 0.2% in comparison (read
Time to Buy the India Infrastructure ETF
).
Clearly a modest risk off trade was in swing during Tuesday's
session, as the U.S. ten year saw yields fall by about three basis
points while German bonds also retreated while Italian and Spanish
counterparts saw yields rise once again. With this result, the
dollar was strong against the euro, but neutral to weak against
many of the other world currencies, putting pressure on commodities
across the board.
In fact, crude oil finished lower by about 2.6% while many softs
also slumped on the day as well. However, some strength was seen in
the industrial metal and soybeans markets, as these commodities
were some of the few to even approach the positives on the session
(read
Top Commodity ETFs in this Uncertain Market
).
For ETF trading, volume was again light across a number of
equity products with funds tracking major U.S. segments seeing far
less than normal interest. However, we did see a resurgence in
commodity ETF interest, as well as a return to modest trading
levels in the emerging market, and developed market ETF world.
Particularly, investors saw an outsized level of interest in the
iShares MSCI Sweden Index Fund (
EWD
)
. This product usually does volume of about 200,000 shares in a
normal session but experienced a spike to well over half a million
shares in Tuesday's session (see
Three European ETFs Beyond the Euro Zone
).
Trading was surprisingly well spread out in the high volume day,
although a couple of big blocks did change hands in the first few
hours of the day. Furthermore, the product finished the day
relatively flat, outperforming more broad based funds which also
saw heightened levels of volume in the early part of the
session.
Another fund which was more popular than usual from a trading
perspective on the day was the iPath
DJ-UBS Livestock TR Sub-Index ETN (
COW
)
. This product usually does about 30,000 shares in volume on a
normal day but had roughly 75,000 shares change hands today.
The ETN fell by about 1.4% on this high volume, bringing the
year-to-date return for COW deeper into the red. This is somewhat
surprising given the solid performance by grains so far this year,
as livestock should be appreciating in line with these crops but
has failed to match their performances so far in 2012.
(Currently, COW has a Zacks ETF Rank of 4 or 'Sell')
(see more in the
Zacks ETF
Center
)
IPATH-DJ-A LVST (COW): ETF Research Reports
ISHARS-SWEDEN (EWD): ETF Research Reports
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