Beating the Street

Peter Lynch started management of the Megellan Fund with Fidelity Investments in 1977 with $18 million in assets and by 1990 the fund had grown to more than $14 billion in assets. He has also written three texts on investing: One Up on Wall Street (ISBN 0671661035), Beating the Street (ISBN 0671759159), and Learn to Earn.

Using the idea that the performance of the S&P500 is the “street” lets take a look at some of the ETF’s that “beat the street”. From my last post I gave a link to the Yahoo ETF Center. From there is a link to Performance which lists the ETFs which can be sorted by YTD column. Excluding the ultra short ETFs, to get an idea of what is really going up, the top performers are GAZ, UNG, JJC, and JJM.

GAZ is the iPath DJ AIG Natural Gas TR Sub-Idx ETN. This fund is designed to reflect the performance of natural gas. UNG is the United States Natural Gas ETF. This fund also is designed to reflect the performance of natural gas. JJC is the iPath DJ AIG Copper TR Sub-Idx ETN. This fund is designed to reflect the performance on copper contracts. Finally, JJM is the iPath DJ AIG Ind Metals TR Sub-Idx ETN. This fund is designed to reflect the performance of industrial metals.The index is composed of four futures contracts, aluminium, nickel, zinc, and copper.

The table below shows the performance of these top performing funds sorted by the YTD column. With the "Street" down 12.85% as reflected by the SPY index, GAZ looks pretty good up 66.73%. Click on table to enlarge.