During the last eight months, with the market bouncing up and down, there have been times when I did not look too smart buying stocks through it all.

Of course I looked the most foolish on March 9, when I wrote the prophetic Nostradamus was a punk! Have we reached bottom? Some folks were commenting that they were staying in cash until the DJIA dropped to 5,000. Today that looks highly improbable, even if the market gives something back over the next few months.

There must be some readers that also have contrarian instincts and made good money this year. This is a reminder to take something off the table. It's time to book some gains. We all did great in 1999 and 2000 only to give it all back and then some. Don't let that happen to you again!

This post is part of a series in which TheStockAdvisors.com asked financial experts to name their top stock pick if McCain or if Obama wins the election.

"Go nuclear if McCain wins," says mutual fund and ETF expert Doug Fabian. Here, in his Successful Investing newsletter, the advisor looks at the Market Vectors Nuclear Energy (NYSE: NLR), an exchange-traded fund that focuses on the sector.

"What is likely to happen if McCain wins the White House? Well, based on what he has said so far in the campaign, I think we can make the following assumptions about the sectors most likely to thrive.

"When it comes to energy, we already have seen that McCain is a big fan of oil drilling. It is thus not a stretch to think that oil services and oil drilling firms are likely to thrive if the Republican takes power.

"McCain's other energy focus is nuclear, and that's good news for companies doing the yeomen work in the space. Once again, when it comes to getting invested in the best companies in a specific market sector, ETFs continue to be our best friends.

"The Market Vectors Nuclear Energy ETF is a fund designed to give investors exposure to the best companies in the nuclear energy sector.

Mark Hulbert at MarketWatch wrote about influential investment newsletter editor, Richard Band's outlandish forecast that the Dow Jones Industrial Average may end the year at 16,000. This very bullish estimate of a 33% gain in the index from someone who's not typically a headline-grabber made Hulbert take note.

Hulbert, who tracks performance of some of the best newsletters in the business, has been tracking Band's Profitable Investing newsletter since 1991. In that time period, Band returned a 8.6% annualized return compared to an almost 11% annualized return in the Wilshire 5000.

Not bad but not outstanding. So why is Band all bulled up?

Technical factors have Band singing a very upbeat tune. The first, according to the article "has to do with the stock market's internal characteristics when it hit a low earlier this month. Band argues that that low possessed "many striking technical resemblances to the great bear market bottoms of the past.""

So, how does Band recommend playing the markets at this important juncture. He recommends a couple of market ETFs. Specifically, Band points to the iShares Russell 1000 Growth Fund (NYSE: IWF), the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index Fund (NYSE: EEM). Another recommendation is in a fund I've never seen before (but maybe I should): the Selected American Shares (SLASX). This fund, a 4-star fund according to Morningstar, invests in US large caps and has returned an annualized return over the past 5 years of almost 13%.

Zack Miller is the managing editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund.

If you've ever delved into investing in ETFs (exchange-traded funds, basically entire indexes and sectors that trade like stocks), you're already familiar with the most popular, those being Powershares QQQ Trust (Nasdaq: QQQQ), SPDR Trust Series 1 (AMEX: SPY), Diamonds Trust, Series 1 (AMEX: DIA), iShares Russell 2000 Index (NYSE: IWM) and lately Financial Select SPDR (AMEX: XLF) and UltraShort QQQ ProShares (AMEX: QID). But have you ever looked into those that are much less followed, but more capable of yielding some big-time returns?

I primarily trade fun smallcap stocks, so until the past few days, I hadn't either. But when I began researching, I just kept finding more and more interesting ETFs -- it was addictive! Almost addictive as my new Twitter account where I've discovered I can chat with business legends, yesterday it was the founder of eBay Inc (Nasdaq: EBAY). Okay, maybe ETFs will never be that addictive!

Out the few hundred ETFs I looked into, here were some of the more interesting of the bunch:

According to The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Edition, investors are in for a treat:

A potentially cutthroat price war is shaping up between two of the biggest firms in the exchange-traded-fund business.

In coming weeks, Vanguard Group plans to roll out an ETF designed to directly undercut one of the biggest products on the market, from rival Barclays Global Investors, a unit of Barclays PLC (NYSE: BCS).

Vanguard is launching the Vanguard Europe Pacific ETF to track the MSCI EAFE index, which provides investors with broad exposure to developed-market equities.

The fund and its obscenely low 0.15% expense ratio take direct aim at Barclays' iShares MSCI EAFE ETF, which has an expense ratio of 0.35%.

Given that low expenses are perhaps the single greatest predictor of a fund's performance, this is awesome news for investors. Baseball speedsters like Kenny Lofton and Carl Crawford are often seen as reliable because it is said that "speed never goes into a slump." A power hitter like Barry Bonds or David Ortiz might lose his home run stroke for a while, but base-stealers can always run when healthy.

Low-expense funds are the Rickey Hendersons of personal finance, and as expense ratios continue their descent, investors will reap the rewards, although the profits of fund managers may decline.

This week's issue of Barron's [subscription required] takes an interesting look at Exchange-traded funds, and their growing prominence. According to the piece, "A survey by Schwab Institutional [...] taken in January, covered nearly 1,400 advisers representing $347 billion in assets under management, and found that 76% of them currently use ETFs in client portfolios. No other instrument had a higher usage rate. Fully 36% said they expected to increase their ETF use, and one in five advisers who don't yet use them expected to begin doing so."

It's great to see advisers increasing the use of ETFs. ETFs often have lower expense ratios than mutual funds, partly because the vast majority are passively managed index funds. A shift to ETFs in all likelihood means a shift away from actively-managed funds, and as reams of data show, that is great news for investors.

However, as always, I think investors can do better with ETFs without a financial advisor. ETFs generally are tax efficient and have low expenses, but adding the expense of a financial advisor can make those fees look a lot more expensive. Active trading tends to eliminate their tax advantages.

I consider myself a proponent of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as the best way for investors interested in making short- to medium-term macroeconomic bets. The Wall Street Journal has a nice article on the pros and cons of these investments. ETFs provide the potential for concentrated exposure to certain sectors or countries that can be very difficult to get through a conventional mutual fund -- In many cases, the expense ratio on an ETF is lower than that of a comparable index mutual fund.

Just as the tradability of ETFs is one of their most attractive qualities, it can also get you into trouble: ETFs almost beg to be traded and, even with $10 commissions, frequent trading can wipe out the advantages they have over traditional mutual funds.

The brokerage commissions make ETFs unsuitable for dollar-cost averaging or investing regular small amounts of money. As the Journal writes, "ETFs can be cheaper than conventional index funds for investors who have a big lump sum, like an inheritance or proceeds from a property sale, to invest. But if you are making numerous small investments, conventional index funds are typically a cheaper way to save for the long term."

So if you want to try your hand at George Soros-style macroeconomic bets, ETFs make that easier to do than ever. Marvin Appel's Investing With Exchange-Traded Funds Made Easy: Higher Returns With Lower Costs -- Do it Yourself Strategies Without Paying Fund Managers is the best introduction to to ETFs I've seen.

To do research on individual closed-end funds, visit ETFConnect.com.

As a result of the growth of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), volume in certain smaller stocks has spiked disproportionately. This is due to the fact that, when money flows in and out of ETFs, funds are forced to buy and sell the holdings proportionately. Consequently, more money flows in and out of ETFs than mutual funds because they are so easy to trade (bought and sold through any broker at any time during the day), so ETFs have had a much larger impact on small company stock prices and volumes than mutual funds have had historically. According to a Wall Street Journal (subscription required) piece on this issue, when the markets fell during late February, "Between Feb. 22 and Feb. 28, just one ETF, the iShares Russell 2000, reported outflows of $2 billion, whereas major small-stock mutual funds combined had outflows of only $101 million, according to AMG Data Services." (emphasis mine)

While this is seemingly insignificant beyond the obvious (price and volume increases in some index-held small-cap companies), when you consider the implications of a volume spike, the issue becomes more important. Many technicians (people who trade stocks based on their price and volume patterns) use volume as an indicator of "special knowledge." However, ETF buying is certainly not special knowledge, and it is actually the direct opposite -- "insensitive buying." As a result, one must certainly question the validity of volume spikes as a method of choosing stocks with smaller market capitalizations if they previously had any confidence in the methods of technical analysis.

Today is the last installment in the Financial Times' series on exchange traded funds. While most ETFs are passively managed index funds, the newspaper discussed fundamental ETFs, which are sort of a hybrid between active management and passive management. While traditional index funds are composed and weighted based on market cap, fundamental funds are weighted based on fundamental metrics, such as earnings, dividends, or the book value of companies. In some cases, they can be weighted to fit a certain investment style. For instance, a value ETF might select companies based on price/book ratio or dividend yield.

John Bogle, founder of Vanguard and probably the best friend individual investors will ever have, is skeptical of the funds. He told the Times, "They come armed with vast statistical studies that prove how well their methodologies have worked in the past....but in mutual fund investing, the past is not prologue." As any fund prospectus warns, past performance is not a guarantee of future sucess. Yet in spite of that warning, most funds brag about their past performance in advertising.

I would stay away from fundamental ETFs and stick with traditional index ETFs as a way to make investments based on macroeconomic bets. That has always been their greatest strength and I think it still is.

For years I've thought that exchange-traded funds were a great resource for individual investors interested in betting on macro-economic trends [subscription required].

ETFs are like mutual funds in that they are portfolios of investments managed by professionals, but like stocks in that they trade throughout the day based on supply and demand for the shares rather than the net asset value of the fund.

At any given moment, an ETF can be trading at a premium or a discount to its net asset value. These funds allow investors to short indexes (without the normal risks/margin requirements), bet on currency fluctuations, choose individual sectors, and invest in foreign countries. One can also invest in commodities, and of course, in index-tracking funds.

To learn more about ETF investing and to research individual ETFs, be sure to visit ETFConnect.com.