The bulls continued to dominate the bears Monday on Wall Street, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a new 2009 high. Reports of an uptick in M&A activity outweighed news of continued job cuts at Sprint, sending stocks soaring to start off the week. But it wasn’t just stocks that jumped on Monday, as the ETFdb 60 Index, a benchmark of the universe of investable assets available through ETFs, jumped 15.95, or 1.6%, to close at 1,015.57.
Among the day’s biggest winners was the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Real Estate Index Fund (IYR), a broad-based REIT ETF that jumped nearly 5% for the session. Developers Diversified Realty Corp. surged on news of a new chief executive, while Kimco Realty got a boost after Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services announced that its outlook was unaffected by a recent purchase. Several earnings announcements also contributed to IYR’s movements: Hospitality Properties missed expectations, while Nationwide Health Properties reported an increase in profitability attributable to rising rents.
Only five components of the ETFdb 60 Index finished the week’s first session in the red, led by the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN (VXX), which slid nearly 6%. The volatility ETN has been rather volatile in recent weeks, moving with a nearly perfect inverse correlation to broad equity markets, a trend that continued to play out on Monday. Following its dip on Monday, VXX becomes an interesting option for investors looking to hedge against a stock market pullback.
Disclosure: No positions at time of writing.
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