Over the next couple weeks, I'll be writing about and discussing our strategies to beat the S&P 500.  After having tremendous success with our equal-weighted stock portfolios, we delved into a Model ETF Portfolio that we announced on October 19th, 2020.  In just 2 1/2 months, our Model ETF Portfolio has gained 11.95% through Tuesday's close, easily outpacing the benchmark S&P 500's gain of 8.75% over the same period.  There are two primary reasons for our early ETF success.  The first is simply understanding that we're in a secular bull market and that aggressive sectors generally outperform when the stock market is strong.  We deliberately overweighted the aggressive sectors.  The second, however, was understanding what's working in the stock market and overweighting those areas as well.  For example, our highest allocation to any ETF in this past quarter was the Amplify Online Retail ETF (IBUY).  Take a look at the absolute and relative strength of this ETF:

 

 

IBUY was a relative leader at the time we selected our ETFs and it remains a leader.  Its SCTR score is at 97.7 currently and it's been in the upper 90s since April.  A primary reason we weighted in the highest in our portfolio (at 20%) was that it was heavily concentrated in the consumer discretionary sector (XLY).  That's one of the best performing sectors and we wanted to make sure we were overweight that group.  Given the COVID-19 pandemic, online retail was a favored area of the market.  Amplify just happened to provide one of the best ranking ETFs in that area at the time, so it became a staple for us.  As we look ahead to the next quarter, we'll make selections in similar fashion, hoping to capitalize in market strength over the next 90 days.