Marketocracy, in their own words, is:

"""Marketocracy Data Services is a research company whose mission is to find the best investors in the world and then track, analyze, and evaluate their trading activity. The company's affiliate, Marketocracy Capital Management, is the investment advisor for the Marketocracy family of mutual funds and uses the research generated by Marketocracy Data Services."""

This isn't an endorsement for Marketocracy, but last October, I started a portfolio there as part of the activities for a club here at the University of Michigan.  While I'd originally intended it to be allocated strictly from the Select Sector SPDR ETFs, Marketocracy rules led me to increase the scope of the fund to include commodities, currencies, and geography-based ETFs.

You can view the portfolio performance at this link: www.marketocracy.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Portfolio.woa/ps/FundPublicPage/source=DeDoDkLbEhAdLcIhMaKiAbDd

Mine

m100

S&P 500

DJIA

Nasdaq

My largest positions at the moment are DUG @ 14%, SHV @ 11%, UPW @ 7%, and EWA @ 5%.  I doubled my exposure in DUG, the double short Oil & Gas fund, this week as it hit a new 52-week low, despite downgrades in both the funds' constitutents and projected consumption.  I'll be looking to lighten the position in the short-term treasuries SHV in the coming month for bottom plays, possibly in the double long financials ETF UYG or some mixture of country ETFs.

    Of these 28 funds with absolute correlation to the S&P 500 below 10%, 20 are municipal funds from Nuveen, BlackRock, and other issuers.  The remaining 8 are global, country-specific, currency, and commodity funds.

    This week brought further downside and volatility to the market, with only 8 of 26 categories positive and an average week category return of -1%. 

    Of those 8 categories that ended the week up, only utilities, Europe, commodities, and short funds were up over 1%. 

    Of the 18 categories that ended the week down, 15 were down over -1%, 8 were down over -2%, and 3 were down over -3%.  The worst performers were infrastructure, transports, energy, and China.

    At this point, only the currency, commodity, and short categories are currently up over the past trading month. 

    Year-to-date, large- and mid-cap categories have only marginally positive adjusted close returns, with small-caps already sliding beneath par. 

Dollar-Weighted Category Return

    Among today's worst losers was real estate, as the new housing data hit the market this morning.  Of the worst 10 funds on the day's performance, 4 of 10 were real estate - FIO is the iShares FTSE Industrial/Office Park REIT introduced recently, URE is the ProShares REIT, RLF is a Cohen & Steers real estate fund, and DCA is the Dividend Capital Realty fund.  

    Notable also was the drop in silver futures today, as evidenced in the fall of DBS and SLV, silver ETFs.  Commodities and natural resources on the whole were down nearly 2% by my dollar-weighted calculations above.

    On the other end, the top fund for the day was CLM, the Cornerstone Strategic Value CEF.  Though closed, in 2005, they claimed their top ten holdings included Citigroup and American Internation Group, both enjoying the latest week of earnings and purchases. 

    Following CLM were mainly Latin American (Brazil's and Mexico's MSCIs EWZ and EWW, the Latin America 40 ILF, Spain Fund SNF, Brazil Telecom ADR TBH) and other foreign funds (Thai Fund TH).  As noted above, today's best performing category was Latin America, trading at another percent-and-a-quarter to China.  Expect the Mexican MSCI fund to be highly correlated to the US markets, however, as much of the rally today was on speculation of rate drop and a soft real estate impact.

    Below you'll find both the full table of the best and worst performers, as well as a list of ETFs and CEFs that traded at least 300% above their 5-session average dollar liquidity today.

Dollar-Weighted ETF/CEF Category Return

    As the Fed released their latest statement in the last hour, markets have responded cautiously, quickly dropping below the morning open but slowly climbing back to previous intraday levels. Though the continued mention of inflation concerns is not surprising, this likely rules out any rate drop in the near future.  Without this rate drop, the stock market will likely need to find fresh momentum elsewhere.

    So now that I've got a working computer again, I wanted to continue to take a look at the performance the standard oil ETFs.  One of the conclusions I'd come to last time was that the daily correlation against the West Texas spot was a neck-to-neck tie between iPath GS Crude (OIL) and US Oil (USO), with the PowerShares (DBO) and Claymore (UCR) 5-15% behind. 

    Based on this data, I think it's clear that those wishing to trade ETFs as an alternative to the actual commodity should focus their attention on OIL and USO.  Whether or not investors should favor these funds, however, is a different question, as daily correlation is not necessarily the best measure of hedge efficiency.

NB: I've continued this with longer-term analysis that makes much more sense for investors.  Though this information is still relevant to those looking for a proxy to trading the futures, this information is much better suited to investors looking for an ETF oil hedge.

    Though my primary computer is unfortunately out of service, I've managed to run some numbers on the big four oil ETFs - Claymore MACROshares Oil Up (UCR), PowerShares DB Oil (DBO), United States Oil (USO), and iPath Goldman Sachs Crude Oil (OIL). 

    These numbers are done on a time series from Jan 05 to Apr 23, and although they're short and only provide 4 contract lifespans, I thought it was important to provide a window into the newer PowerShares DBO's behavior.