Tag Archives: healthcare etf

ETFs To Watch This Week Include ETFs Involved In Oil and The Yen

MarketsMuse blog update highlights the must watch ETFs for the first week of June. The ETFs range from health care, to oil, the Japanese Yen. This update is courtesy of the Benzinga’s author, David Fabian, and his article, “Healthcare, Yen And Oil ETFs To Watch This Week“, with an excerpt from the article below.

The summer months are often characterized by lower volume and heightened volatility, which seems to be a trend that has already established itself this year.

Several important events this week have the potential to impact the market including: personal spending, motor vehicle sales and non-farm payroll data.

Here are the key ETFs to watch for the week of June 1:

Health Care Select Sector SPDR XLV 0.25%

Healthcare stocks have continued to show tremendous strength this year and XLV has been one of the leading sector components of the S&P 500 Index. This ETF is made up of 57 large-cap stocks in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical services fields. Top holdings include well-known companies such as Johnson & Johnson JNJ 1% and Pfizer Inc PFE 0.9%.

CurrencyShares Japanese Yen Trust FXY 0.1%

After appearing to stabilize through the first four months of the year, the Japanese yen currency has once again plunged markedly lower versus the U.S. dollar in May. FXY tracks the daily price movement of the yen versus the U.S. dollar and is down 3.64 percent so far this year.

United States Oil Fund LP (ETF) USO 3.83%

Crude oil prices jumped 4 percent on Friday and managed to recoup the majority of the slide this commodity experienced in May. USO tracks the daily price movement of West Texas Intermediate Light Sweet Crude Oil futures and is the most heavily traded oil ETF.

To continue reading about why oil, the yen, and health care are must watch ETF categories according Benzinga reporter, David Fabian, click here.

 

An Obamacare ETF Winner

indexuniverseCourtesy of Tom Lydon

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it is widely known, is this country’s most sweeping health care legislation in multiple generations. It has also been highly controversial, but political partisanship aside, select stocks and ETFs have benefited from President Obama’s efforts to increase access and affordability to healthcare while holding insurance companies more accountable.

The iShares U.S. Healthcare Providers ETF (NYSEArca: IHF) is one such fund. Year-to-date, IHF is up 22.8% and the ETF has surged 34.3% in the past year. Those performances have come after many analysts originally had less-than-encouraging outlooks for the health care sector in a post-Obamacare world. IHF and its 47-stock roster have also remained sturdy in the face of the fiscal cliff and sequestration debates. [ETF Spotlight: Affordable Care Act]

With the U.S. moving forward with the Affordable Care Act, millions of new clients are expected to flow into the health care sector. That portends potentially rosy future outlooks for IHF constituents such as Dow component UnitedHealth (NYSE: UNH) and Express Scripts (NasdaqGS: ESRX). As a result, IHF has jumped almost 23% since Election Day 2012. [ETFs for Obama’s Second Term]

Despite IHF’s obvious success, the ETF’s gains, fueled by its components, have caught some health care sector analysts and observers by surprise. “In some ways, the sector’s good fortune seems counterintuitive: All sectors of the industry are under stress, thanks to various provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act that seek to wrestle with health costs, hospital performance and health insurer profit margins. Hospital and prescription use is flattening,” reports Bill Tolland for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.   For the remainder of the article, please visit IndexUniverse.com

                                   

ETFs & Obamacare: The Broccoli ETF

“If Congress can force me to buy health insurance, can it also force me to eat broccoli?”…

That question, according to WallachBeth Capital’s Chris Hempstead, is one that he can’t answer, but Hempstead does have a sharp-as-a-scalpel perspective re: the ETFs to put under a microscope as the US Supreme Court is scheduled to perform surgery on President Obama’s healthcare initiative:

IHF: IShares DJ US Healthcare Providers (77% Healthcare Services and 17% Pharma)

Year to date the IHF fund is +11.6% and since Obamacare passed +24% versus SPX of 12.6% and 20% respectively.

PTH: PowerShares Dynamic Healthcare Sector (25% Pharma, 25% Healthcare Products, 24% Healthcare Services and 14% Biotech)

YTD the PTH fund is +12.6% (SPX 12.6%) and since Obamacare +28% (SPX 20%).

FXH: First Trust Health Care AlphaDEX (30% Pharma, 30% Healthcare Services, 24% Healthcare Products and 12% Biotech)

YTD the FXH fund is +13% (SPX 12.6%) and since Obamacare +29% (SPX 20%).

YTD  XLV is +7.9% (SPX 12.6%) and since Obamacare +16% (SPX 20%).  XLV has an expense ratio of .18%.