How does editor Nathan Slaughter find high-quality ETF investment ideas?
In an effort to uncover today’s most profitable ETFs, Nathan has developed a proprietary ETF rating system. This proprietary model incorporates his comprehensive research, analysis and market outlook, and it allows him to provide you with an easy-to-interpret letter grade for each and every ETF he profiles in The ETF Authority. To determine this grade, he judges funds on a number of quantitative factors, including fees and expenses, volatility and risk-adjusted performance, relative returns, and tax efficiency, among other things. And to supplement this hard data, he adds his subjective, forward-looking assessment of a specific fund’s outlook, based on relative strength, valuation and a host of other technical and fundamental criteria. As the most important grading criterion, he assigns a fund’s relative performance a score ranging from 1 (lowest) to 15 (highest). Each of the other five grading categories are worth five points. From that total, he determines a fund’s grade as follows:
