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View the full NYSE:DRN chart at Wikinvest

Today’s Daily Angle comes from Wikinvest Wire member Blain Reinkensmeyer of StockTradingToGo.com. You can read the full article on on Blain’s Blog.

Looking to add some hot Exchange Traded Funds – ETFs – to your investment portfolio?

If so you need to read the list below which consists of the 10 best ETFs based on overall return from the last month. Note: ETFs must trade atleast 50,000 shares per day to be included.

Top ETFs

1. Direxion Real Estate Bull 3X (DRN), up 14.36%
2. Direxion Small Cap Bull 3X (TNA) up 11.46%
3. Direxion China Bull 3X (CZM), up 11.09%
4. ProShares Ultra Real Estate (URE), up 9.66%
5. Direxion Midcap Bull 3X (MWJ), up 9.14%
6. ProShares Ultra Basic Materials (UYM), up 8.15%
7. ProShares Ultra Semiconductors (USD), up 8.11%
8. ProShare Ultra Russel 2000 (UWM), up 7.38%
9. Spider S&P Retail (XRT), up 7.32%
10. ProShares Ultra Midcap 400 (MVV), up 7.20%

Pretty noticeable to see that the majority of ETFs are ultra and triple leveraged. Due to new regulation the marginrequired to buy these types of funds has been increased but they still remain extremely popular.

Today’s Daily Angle comes from Wikinvest Wire member Saj Karsan of BarelKarsan.com. You can read the full article on Saj’s blog.

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View the full TSE:HCI chart at Wikinvest

Hartco (HCI) is an IT solutions company servicing the private and public sectors. The company appears to offer somevalue potential at its current price, with a market cap of $50 million, which is not much more than its net current asset value, and earnings of almost $2 million in its last quarter.

The company is up to some interesting tricks, however. Two days before its 3rd quarter began, the company announced that it may buy back up to 5% of its common stock in the coming year. But this appeared to be nothing more than a public relations move: in the third quarter, the company ended up buying back just 22,000 shares. At the same time, it issued 987,668 options to executives and directors!

Issuing options is nothing new of course, but what is worrisome is that the company only has 13.6 million shares outstanding, yet in a single quarter it issued 7% of that number in stock options! Equally worrisome is how the company talks up its buybacks in the headlines, while quietly issuing this egregious number of options in the background. The company used this line in its top paragraph on “business priorities” to talk up its paltry purchase of 22,000 shares, while it made no effort to explain the unusually large issuance of options:

“At September 30, 2009 the Company had repurchased 22,000 shares at an average price of $ 2.18 per share for a total of $ 48,000. The Board of directors of Hartco considers that the [buyback] is an appropriate use of financial resources and will be beneficial to Hartco.”

Management will often headline the items that are likely to appease shareholders. However, the onus is on investors to dig deeper in order to figure out what the company is really up to.

Today’s Daily Angle comes from Wikinvest Wire member Richard Wilson of HedgeFundBlogger.com. You can read the full article on Richard’s blog.

The hedge fund secondary market hit an all-time low in the end of 2009 in terms of prices offered for hedge funds. The largest secondary hedge fund market provider reports that last month sellers received less than 80 cents on the dollar. See this page for an explanation of the Secondary Market.

“The choice that investors face when they find themselves with unwanted illiquid assets is slow bleed vs cut your losses and move on,” Hedgebay co-founder Elias Tueta said. “The kinds of illiquid assets that most hedge fund investors find themselves holding today are very long term in nature. Last year’s credit and equity market ralliesallowed hedge fund managers to sell a fair amount of assets and return capital. What wasn’t sold last year could be with us for quite some time. Since these assets are illiquid, managers do not frequently change their pricing and as a result they are ‘non-performing’ in an investor’s portfolio. This dead weight makes achieving performance targets very difficult.”

Prices on the Hedgebay Global Hedge Fund Secondary Market Index—which had remained near or above NAV since its inception in 1999—plummeted in the summer of 2008. After a brief recovery in mid-2009, when prices topped 90% of NAV, the index again tumbled, sinking below 80% for the first time. In December, not a single trade was completed at or above NAV; the closest was 97%. The lowest trade went for just 56% of NAV. Source