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Best ETF Areas of Last Week

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Wall Street was upbeat last week. The S&P 500 added 1.3% last week, the Dow Jones inched up 0.3% last week and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 2.4% last week. Easing inflation, soft manufacturing data renewed Fed rate cut bets and the strengthening of the tech rally led to the gains last week.

A decline in Treasury yields earlier in the week bolstered the market rally. Both the 10-year and 30-year rates reached their lowest levels since late March.  U.S. technology stocks recorded their largest weekly inflows last week in nine weeks, with the sector seeing a revival after its mega-cap-led rally lost steam by the end of May, per strategists at BofA Global Research, as quoted on MarketWatch.

Tech stocks hauled in nearly $1 billion in the week ending Wednesday, the highest in more than two months, after experiencing the same amount of outflows the previous week, a team of strategists led by Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at BofA Global Research, said in a Friday client note.

Meanwhile, the US economy added 272,000 jobs in May 2024, the maximum in five months, compared to a downwardly revised 165,000 in April, and well above forecasts of 185,000. The reading is also higher than the average monthly gain of 232,000 over the prior 12 months and 246,000 in the first four months of the year.

Against this backdrop, below we highlight a few winning ETF areas of last week.

ETFs in Focus

Bitcoin Miners 

Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI - Free Report) – Up 15%

VanEck Digital Transformation ETF (DAPP - Free Report) – Up 10.1%

Bitcoin prices Bitcoin surpassed the $71,000-mark last week, indicating increased market confidence in potential Fed rate cuts. Investors should also note that the short-term correlation between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 Index is at its highest since early 2023 (per Bloomberg), indicating that further gains in the tech-heavy index may coincide with a rise in the crypto market leader (read: Will Bitcoin ETFs Soar on Sooner-Than-Expected Fed Rate Cut?).

Natural Gas

United States Natural Gas Fund LP (UNG - Free Report) – Up 14.7%

United States 12 Month Natural Gas Fund LP (UNL - Free Report) – Up 8.9%

As efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions intensify, natural gas is anticipated to maintain its critical role in the U.S. electricity generation mix. Natural gas is the largest source of electricity in the United States. With the electricity demand increasing day by day for seamless operation and execution of artificial intelligence (AI), natural gas has every reason to rally.

Semiconductor

TrueShares Technology, AI & Deep Learning ETF (LRNZ - Free Report) – Up 5.5%

VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH - Free Report) – Up 4.9%

These funds are heavy on NVIDIA (NVDA - Free Report) , which overtook Apple (AAPL - Free Report) last week, topping $3 trillion in market cap and becoming the second-most valuable company in the United States. NVIDIA has an estimated 80% market share in AI chips for data centers, which are attracting billions of dollars in spending from big cloud vendors. Companies like Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Alphabet are rapidly expanding their AI computing capabilities, boosting NVIDIA's growth (read: NVIDIA Overtakes Apple: ETFs to Tap the Incredible Growth Story).

Weight-Loss Drugs

Roundhill GLP-1 & Weight Loss ETF (OZEM - Free Report) – Up 3.8%

Shares of weight loss drug manufacturers – Eli Lilly (LLY - Free Report) and Novo Nordisk (NVO - Free Report) – gained 3.5% and 6.8% last week. More than 1 billion individuals worldwide are living with obesity, a figure expected to impact over half the population by 2035.

There is intense competition among the companies producing GLP-1 medicines. Roundhill Investment believes that weight loss drugs, especially GLP-1 agonists, represent one of the most revolutionary advancements in the global pharmaceuticals industry (read: Play These New ETFs to Tap Lucrative Weight Loss Drug Market).

 


 

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