I was watching Roger Nusbaum's look ahead into next week and his advice really struck a chord with my current feelings.  Maybe I'm just stubbornly cautious, but how some people justify large weights for non-speculative portfolios in volatile sectors, countries, or industries is beyond me.  I decided to focus on options for each of the categories he mentioned, so here's the break down of the ETFs/CEFs that I'm going to look at.

    The following table summarizes a number of parameters.  All numbers are calculated with the adjusted close over the intersection of the symbols' ranges to be fair - that is, if one of the funds has traded over 50 sessions only, the funds are only compared over those 50 sessions. 

    Variance/Mean is what percentage the standard deviation squared is compared to the average price.  The returns are calculated over 20 and 100 sessions, although for the infrastructure funds, some of the funds hadn't traded 100 sessions yet.  Last is the correlation to the SPY S&P ETF, which should give a good idea of the correlation to the overall market.  Note that this is also sorted by increasing Variance/Mean.

    For comparison, SPY has a variance/mean of 8% over the last 100 sessions, gained 3.81% in the last 20 sessions, and gained 5.83% in the last 100 sessions.

    Edit: I've been reading through more analyst research and prospecti, and I've come to realize that the difference in real coverage and transparency between ETFs and CEFs is greater than I understood it to be.  I've also changed the SPY correlation data to weekly log-return price return correlation (aside: if only there were one correlation calculation that were best for all purposes).