Five new commodity ETFs: sugar, soybeans, wheat, oil, natural gas,

Teucrium announced this week the filing with the SEC of registration statements for five new commodity Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). 

These ETFs cover sugar, soybeans, and wheat. 

• CANE: Teucrium Sugar Fund
• SOYB: Teucrium Soybean Fund
• WEAT: Teucrium Wheat Fun
• CRUD:  Teucrium WTI Crude Oil Fund
• NAGS:  Natural Gas Fund

 These proposed ETFs will join the Teucrium Corn Fund. 

"Each is designed to offer investors and hedgers liquidity, transparency and capacity in single-commodity ETF products. ETFs are transparent because holdings are disclosed daily on a website and liquid because they can be traded throughout the market day."

“By filing registration statements for these five single-commodity ETFs, three of which are intended to offer individual exposure to these agricultural commodities, we are trying to break new ground,” said Sal Gilbertie, Founder and President of Teucrium Trading LLC. “We design all of our ETFs for real exposure to the underlying commodity itself.”

Gilbertie said all five of these ETFs have been designed to incorporate Teucrium’s unique approach to tracking the price of the underlying commodity. “I believe our differentiation in the marketplace starts with our team’s ability to design products based on our expertise and commodities-trading experience,” he said. “We design our ETFs to offer investors and hedgers simple and efficient single-commodity ETF products that are intended to closely track each index, after fees.” 

Municipal bond ETFs

The fiscal year for municipalities usually begins July 1st. The outstanding amount is about $3T. Many of them may have to default. As for the holders of this debt:

• Households ­ $1 trillion
• Banks ­ $220 billion
• Insurance companies ­ $350 billion
• Mutual funds ­ $500 billion
• Money markets ­ $370 billion
• Broker/dealers own just $40 billion.

Here are some municipal bond ETFs for various timeframes:

Short term

• iShares S&P Short Term AMT-Free National Municipal Bond Fund (SUB)
• Market Vectors-Lehman Brothers AMT-Free Short Municipal Index ETF (SMB)
• PIMCO Short Term Municipal Bond Strategy Fund (SMMU)
• PowerShares VRDO Tax-Free Weekly Portfolio (PVI)
• SPDR Lehman Short-Term Municipal Bond ETF (SHM)
• SPDR S&P VRDO Municipal Bond ETF (VRD)

Intermediate-Term National Municipal Bond ETFs

• Grail McDonnell Intermediate Municipal Bond ETF (GMMB)
• Market Vectors-Lehman Brothers AMT-Free Intermediate Continuous Municipal Index (ITM)
• Market Vectors Pre-Refunded Municipal Index Fund (PRB)
• PIMCO Intermediate Municipal Bond Strategy Fund (MUNI)

Long-Term National Municipal Bond ETFs

• iShares S&P National Municipal Bond Fund (MUB)
• Market Vectors-Lehman Brothers AMT-Free Long Continuous Municipal Index (MLN)
• PowerShares Insured National Municipal Bond Portfolio (PZA)
• PowerShares Build America Bond Portfolio (BAB)
• SPDR Lehman Municipal Bond ETF (TFI)

China Unpegs Currency: Yuan ETFs

Much is being made about China's big announcement that it will let the Yuan float.  While Professor Nouriel Roubini says that the move may backfire for the western world (and the currency may depreciate), China itself says any appreciation in its currency alone can not rebalance world growth and it is urging other major countries to implement more fundamental reforms.

CNY is down 1.39% and CYB is down 1.03% since December of last year. Any 1 to 2% appreciation is meaningless at this point.

All currency ETFs are tracked live on the Live Tracking sites.

Natural gas ETF UNG straddles

Here are straddles (strangles) for UNG for June, July, and October. June is of course extremely risky. The price of natural gas has recovered somewhat lately, for what seems to be unjustified reasons. It is only  amatter of time until UNG drops again.

Computed with StraddlesCalc.

This is not advice. Please do your own due diligence. Options are dangerous and may cause 100% loss.

FIFA 2010 world cup: odds of winning according to GS report

The above are the odds of each twema winning the 2010 FIFA World Cup, according to a report published by... Goldman Sachs.

A study on the economics of the FIFA World Cup, which is about to start this Friday in South Africa:

Top 20 most oversold and overbought leveraged ETFs in the U.S.

We track all leveraged ETFs live on this site.

Here are the top 20 most oversold and most overbought ETFs that trade in the U.S. These are determined by ordering by RSIA, an average of short, medium, and long indicators.

Oversold (positions on top are most oversold):

Overbought (positions on top are most overbought):

Is oil going up or down? It does not matter.

UCO is trading close to the $10 strike price. Below are 10 straddles for June, which allow an investor to profit either direction, as long as the stock moves the required amount..

A move of about 10% will make the position profitable. Calculated with StraddlesCalc.

Options are dangerous and may cause 100% loss. Please do your own due diligence!

Stock Diversification Through Commodity ETFs

With the end of the month we calculated the correlations of all commodity ETFs on the market. Correlations are extremely important for proper investment diversification. Stocks that are highly correlated, those whose  correlation values close to +1 or -1, do not provide sector diversification

Here are the values:

Please click to enlarge image.

Some of the best uncorrelated pair of commodity ETFs include:

• JO and AGF, DAG, GRN, GRU, JJA, JJT, SBG, UAG
• NIB and JJS, JO
• UBC and JS