Because there is BIG benefit to be concentrated in top performers when they're going up and to be in the "least bad" when things are going down.
Yes, I understand. I think that it's impossible to predict which countries are going to be going up. Yes there is some momentum and you might get a little advantage in the short run by buying and selling out of certain countries. However, I do think that in the long run that will all wash out. More importantly would be taking advantage and re balancing during major downturns and staying on track and continue to invest. That will really compound returns fast. Maybe I'm not terribly familiar with relative strength analysis. I've done some at Merrill Lynch where we looked at the 40 day moving average for volume and compared that to today's average. Also, I think if we're just looking at NAV of the ETF it's basically looking at the ETF trading price. By the time we see an uptick, we've already missed out. Yeah there is some momentum, but we already missed an uptick, so we're behind. My philosophy and strategy is a super long buy and hold. You need to think on the time scale of entire countries at this point too. Companies have a pretty long time horizon, countries have an even longer.
Would you still weight them based on market cap? That's kind of the whole point. I feel like relative strength almost implies equally weighting.
No, just on group/issue relative performance. Nothing needs to be "equal". No need to complicate things. Just be able to rank performance since _______ (pick date). KISS, as always.
Yeah that's like the same concept as actively trading from stocks in the s&p 500 instead of buying the index, but on a global scale
Sort of. But instead of having to choose from hundreds of stock issues, you need to track maybe 30 ETFs... the major index ones, sectors, and a couple of international.
I'm just not an active trader, more of a passive aggressive person. I don't even like trying to time sectors. Just the S&P 500 but all countries instead of companies. The fixed income took longer to develop that's all GDP based which I think is intuitive. The ability of a country to repay debt.
There is already a total world market etf. It is used by the two etf strategy along with a bond etf. The vanguard total market etf is VTI for US and VXUS for international. The two etf strategy is talked about on www.bogleheads.org
Are you referring to URTH? As mentioned before, that groups all the stocks together from largest to smallest. It makes a little more sense if you group them in terms of individual country and sort the countries from largest to smallest.