By: Rich B. Meier
In yesterday’s Top Equity News’ sector review, we made it a point to highlight sectors that traditionally lead in times of growth planted their flags in the sell column; while more defensive stocks were headed towards the front lines of performance.
More evidence that Wall Street, at least for now, is getting defensive heading into 2012 showed up in our Wednesday evening ETF performance review. In a stinking rotten day for long investors, many exchange-traded-funds that treaded water had words like defensive, bear, hedge, low volatility, low P/E, consumer staples, and of course utilities in their titles.
I mean, we all know the average Joe/Jane isn’t going to stop washing down Cheetos with a MGD while watching the 60 inch – no matter what.
Yesterday’s performance message is unmistakable; the institutional money has turned on the fasten your seatbelts’ sign to prepare for turbulence. Sure, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are going to try and twist, print, dollar swap, longer-term refinancing operate (LTRO)… a path around the bigger bumps, but the plane is gonna shake. At least, that’s what’s shown up on TEN’s market Doppler for the past few days.
Like we do every week, Top Equity flipped back the lid on the day’s best performing ETFs, looking for some common green in a sea of red. We found seven companies taking up residence in multiple funds. They include:
Whole Foods Market, Inc. (WFM)
Lorillard, Inc. (LO)
Hershey Co. (HSY)
Sara Lee Corp. (SLE)
Edison International (EIX)
CVS Caremark Corporation (CVS)
Raytheon Co. (RTN)
Whole Foods (WFM), in our opinion, offers the best combination of technical and fundamental strength. The organic grocery stores chain’s MCAD line, 12 and 26 day-averages are moving in a way that suggests the stock price could be headed higher in the near-term.
The chart also tells us that a new uptrend could be unfolding as the last round of profit-taking ended with a higher low than the previous cycle’s low. If Whole Foods can break past $70 with confidence, shares are likely to challenge the 52 week-high of $74.45.
ETF X-Ray:Getting Whole After a Bad Day is an article from: 
