Sun 30 Jul 2006
I didn’t realize it, but just found out that Rydex actually has an equally weighted S&P 500 ETF — the ticker symbol is RSP (complete with options, though they don’t seem very popular).
In case you’re wondering about the releative performance, take a look at the 3 year comparison of prices: RSP:SPY. ? When the market was going up, RSP handily outperformed the SPY…? but when the market turned down in May, the equal weighting index underperformed, giving up its relative gains for the last 12 months.
So, it looks like RSP is a good choice during market strength, but might give up a lot of it’s leadership when the market becomes choppy…
I’m wondering if the under/over performance of RSP can act as any sort of indicator, like the NYSE Advance/Decline Ratio, or the NDX:DJX ratio…
July 30th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Did you see this?
http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2006/07/rsp-and-spy-unweighted-and-weighted-sp.html
Not as interesting an analysis as yours.
The real question is whether the RSP outperformance in good times makes up of the underperformance in bad times over the long run. How does the rate of underderperformance compare to the rate of overperformance?
July 30th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
I should mention that I get a pretty sour taste in my mouth over the kind of “analysis” that Trader Feed is doing here (and does often) because it is very susceptible to false correlations. Any time I see “on 3 occasions Y followed X so they might be related”, I want to scream.