Intelligent Speculator

The next year is only days away now and while many of us are thinking about Christmas, holidays and others. It is also time to start looking at what will be the better investments for next year. Over the next few weeks I will be writing about possible winners for 2010 as well as announcing results for the stock picking competition that I was part of (was leading after Q3), making my 4 new picks for 2010 and many others. So no holidays for me!

I think one of the best ways to get ideas about the best ETF’s for 2010 is to look at what has worked so far in 2009, so here are the top performing 2009 ETF’s as of Friday’s close in the US!!!

Top ETF’s so far in 2009 as per their return

Surprised? I guess it’s not a huge surprise to have a few leveraged ETF’s at the top. They offer so much possibilities that if you pick the right one, you are sure to make a good return. Of course, there are many risks involved in leveraged ETF’s and I am far from certain that I will be picking a leveraged ETF in my picks for 2010! I have always liked leveraged ETF’s as trading investments, not as long term investments. Does one year count as long term?? I guess that depends on each investor.

So here is the chart from TYH, a 3x leverage on technology stocks in the past few months:

If I had been asked to guess what the best non leveraged ETF had been, I would have never guessed that it was RSX, an ETF that tracks the Russian stock market. It is also quite interesting because Goldman Sachs has actually said that being long Russia is one of their top trade recommendations for 2010!

Commodities like Oil and Natural Gas???

We (I’ll take the blame as well) tend to discuss Oil, Natural Gas and Gold when discussing commodities and it is no surprise to see that a few of the top returning ETF’s in 2009 have been commodities. But not the ones we always hear about. Rather, ETF’s on coal (KOL, PKOL), lead(LD) and Copper (JJC) have been solid enough to make the top 10 list!!

It is certainly interesting to see that despite all of the talk about clean energy and cap and trade, the top returns still origin from the “dirty energy” and older resources. This trend might influence my picks for 2010 as there are no doubt resources that will perform better than the usual picks on oil and natural gas.

Among those top 10 ETF’s, which would you think will perform best in 2010????