If there’s one fund that neatly captures the defeat of being a bear the past 2.5 years, it is the AdvisorShares Active Bear ETF (NYSE:HDGE). It describes itself thusly: “The investment seeks capital appreciation through short sales of domestically traded equity securities. The Sub-Advisor seeks to achieve the fund’s investment objective by short selling a portfolio of liquid mid- and large-cap U.S. exchange-traded equity securities, The Sub-Advisor implements a bottom-up, fundamental, research driven security selection process that seeks to identify securities with low earnings quality or aggressive accounting that may tend to mask operational deterioration and bolster the reported earnings per share over a short time period.”
Well, the bottom-up, fundamental, research-driven security selection produces results like those below, which is no surprise, in a centrally-planned economy like ours (and take note, this is not a leveraged fund!) The brief lifts in 2011 and 2012 have given way to a steady descent, topped off nicely by yesterday’s lifetime low, as Yellen has her tiny hands around the market’s neck.
