Top ETFs Of 2016 So Far

The first two months of 2016 are nearly over, and it’s been a rough year so far for long-side equity holders in general. The S&P 500 (SPX)(SPY) is down around -3.9% year-to-date (YTD) — but has actually recovered from the low of down around -10%.

What sectors are outperforming and underperforming the broad market by the most in 2016 thus far? We looked at pure sector play ETFs based on YTD performance — screening (on FinViz) for liquid names that have options trading and are shortable, as we are looking for ETFs to actively trade with the leverage and flexbility of options. We exclude Ultra/Inverse/Bear/3x etc ETFs from our screen to find the underlying sector names — also we remove duplicate sector names to find the broadest list (for example, Gold Miners ETF (GDX) is on the list, so we skipped Gold ETF (GLD) as one of the biggest winners — similarly, we don’t have multiple Biotech names on the list, despite their broad weakness this year so far).

Here are the Best of 2016 through February:

Top Performers
(GDX) Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF +36.22% 
(VXX) iPath VIX Short Term Futures ETN +20.25%
(TLT) iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond +8.17%
(XLU) SPDR Select Utilities ETF +7.51%
(SLV) iShares Silver Trust +6.52%

You can see the winners list is entirely comprised of ‘flight to safety’ type names — Gold/Silver, Volatility, Treasury Bonds and Utilities.  Also note that several of these ETFs were among the biggest losers of recent years.

It’s an open question as to whether these ultra-defensive names will continue to outperform in the remainder of 2016 — but in particular, don’t discount the up moves in Gold/Silver and Utilities.

And now to the Biggest Losers of 2016:

Worst Performers
(XBI) SPDR Biotech ETF -30.67%
(UNG) US Natural Gas -28.95%
(TAN) Guggenheim Solar ETF -24.32%
(OIL) iPath GSCI Crude Oil ETN -22.47%
(GREK) Global X Greece 20 ETF -20.35%