I’m a big fan of the free investment web tools (Google finance, Yahoo finance, MSN money), but I’ve always stated that the fee based tools are worth the money. The free information is quickly closing the information gap on the pay services, just a bit more scattered and time consuming to find. Sector rotation and industry ranking information is one key feature of many fee based financial tools, but I just stumbled across the Prophet.net site that gives it away for FREE!



Here is the top portion of a basic snapshot of the prophet.net industry rankings:

The image above only shows the higher rated industry groups so they are all green, meaning that the money is flowing into these industry groups. On the prophet.net website you can see the entire performance grid, including the bottom ranking industry groups (anyone want to take a guess?).

This layout of the chart is remarkably similar to the investools big chart, but with a few more bells and whistles. You can change the view of the prophet.net chart to either historical trends or current performance. I personally perfer the historical information, as shown in the image above. The trending is read from right to left, with the most recent data on the left. The numbers in the chart are industry group percentiles, as compared to other groups. In a nutshell, the higher the number, especially when trending upwards from week to week, signifies that big institutional money (mutual funds, pension plans) is flowing into that industry group.

The information is particularly valuable for ETF investors who want to be in the next heated sector. It’s also useful for those that want to maintain hedged portfolios using pairs of ETF’s – one long and one short for example. The proshares inverse ETF in an out of favor group could act as the downside hedge, along with an upside play on a hot performing group.