Friday, October 26, 2007

Know Your Components of ETFs

I really enjoy David Letterman and am not much of a Jay Leno fan. Maybe it is an East Coast / West Coast thing. Or maybe it’s because I was a real Johnny Carson fan and Letterman is cut from Carson’s mold. One of my favorite bits on Letterman is “Know Your Cuts of Beef.” In than spirit I have my own version today – Know Your Components of ETFs.

This comes out of a conversation with an old friend who from time to time will closely follow my recommendations. He asked me yesterday where I thought Google (GOOG) was going. I said I have a target of $750- $850. This is based on both a top down and bottom up analysis which I performed with my research team. My friend said that he owned the Internet HOLDRs (HHH), an ETF comprised of internet stocks. To his surprise, I informed him that GOOG was not represented in the HHH. I explained that HHH was mostly comprised of Ebay (EBAY), Amazon.com (AMZN), Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner (TWX). HHH was introduced and launched many years before GOOG came to market and is a fixed portfolio. Since he thought he had GOOG exposure but had none; he wanted to keep exposure to EBAY and YHOO; and, wanted to cut back on exposure to TWX, AMZN and the other residual stocks in the HHH comprising about 15% of the portfolio he immediately sold some (but not all) of his HHH and used the proceeds to buy GOOG.

The lesson - Know Your Components of ETFs.

At the time of this Blog entry Scott Rothbort, his family and or clients of LakeView Asset Management, LLC were long shares of GOOG --- although positions can change at any time.



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