Each week, I like to publish the past week's hottest ETFs to share some new trends and niche ETFs out there and give investors some new ideas. Markets have been extremely strong off the lows in March, leaving some prospective investors on the sidelines wondering if they missed the boat or if they should start investing today given the longer term returns markets historically deliver. This week, we saw a massive runup in Financials as investors breathed a sigh of relief following the Stress Test results that weren't as bad as anticipated, we saw continued strength in emerging markets and some more strength from particular metals ETFs that dominated this list in April as well.

FAS Up 60% - Direxion Financial Bull 3X Shares - This ETF's a routine mention on the hot ETF weekly updates and represents a leveraged 3X return on shares of banking/financial companies. Basically, with the fear of a complete economic collapse and complete nationalization abating, shares are rallying with double digit returns weekly simply because of the abysmal levels they reached over the past year. If worried about being caught on the wrong side of this hyper-volatile trade, you could always try the hedged approach to FAS/FAZ with this hedged Financials play.

ERX - Up 27% - Direxion Energy Bull 3X - Up 13% on Friday alone, this 3X energy ETF is rallying in the face of a possible global recovery within site and US jobs numbers that came in better than expected. Paradoxically, oil demand in the US, the world's leading consumer, is at 10-year lows, yet oil continues to rally. Evidently, this is a trade on a strong bounce back from the recent shock as opposed to near term fundamental support.


AGQ - Up 25% - ProShares Ultra Silver - This is a 2X leveraged ETF tracking the return of silver. The ETF was up nicely for the week, but is well of its high in February.

JJT - Up 24% - Barclays iPath Tin - This one's actually an ETN which carries ETN-specific risks to consider that ETFs don't, but as far as I've seen, it's the only pure play on Tin, which rallied significantly last week - again.

UNG - Up 23% - US Natural Gas Fund - With Natural Gas prices in the $12/1000 cubic foot range a year ago and today's prices at less than a third of that, as the economy shows any glimmer of hope, expect to see these prices continue to rally. However, don't assume that there's a perfect correlation between natural gas and oil, because there isn't. While UNG rallied 23% last week, oil shares rose less than 10%. And YTD, oil's flat while UNG is still down over 25%.



Disclosure: I've been long USO (1x oil) for some time now; no other holdings in the aforementioned ETFs.