As we exited a lukewarm August and stepped into the final month of Q3, the investing cohort must have shifted its focus to the likely market movement in September. This is especially true given the month’s cursed seasonality in the equity market.
September is historically the worst month of the year for stocks. According to moneychimp.com, a consensus carried out from 1950 to 2016 has revealed that September ended up offering positive returns in 29 years and negative returns in 38 years, with an average return of negative 0.67%, which is worse than any month.
Undesirable financial events like the start of the Great Depression in 1929 or the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 all crept up in the month of September. Even this September bears the risk of considerable negative changes to the market in case geopolitical tensions between North Korea and the U.S. heighten, and political uncertainty in the United States related to tax reforms and government shutdown escalates.
All these make it more important to pin point ETFs that could safeguard investors from any steep and sudden market swing as well as lead them to some gains.
PowerShares QQQ QQQ
September may be ill reputed in terms of stock returns, but this time the month opened up with a deluge of upbeat data points. First, at the end of August, the Commerce Department released Q2 economic growth data of 3% compared with its earlier estimate of 2.6%. This was the best GDP growth since first-quarter 2015 (read: Top ETF Stories of August).
And at the start of September, data showed that U.S. manufacturing expanded in August at the quickest clip since 2011. This calls for growth investing. We are thus bullish on Nasdaq-100 ETF QQQ. Nasdaq Composite has already registered the largest weekly gain of the year on signs of economic strength and a bounce in biotech shares.
SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (XBI – Free Report)
Biotech ETFs, especially those with a focus on cancer therapy, staged a great show in August in particular on Gilead’s (XBIGILD – Free Report) buyout announcement of clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Kite Pharma (KITE – Free Report) .Plus, a CAR-T treatment — a type of gene therapy for cancer —has been approved for use in the United States lately. All these developments in the biotech sphere should bode well for the related ETFs (read: Biotech ETFs Soar on Gilead-Kite Deal).
