As a cheerful Bloomberg headline reminds us, equity investors are facing their worst June since the Great Depression. And sure enough, most major markets (the Hang Seng, Dax, CAC, S&P 500 … ) are down more than -8% this month, pulled lower by a number of concerns including a) the health of Western banks, b) the rise in oil prices, c) deteriorating economic growth and d) worsening inflationary pressures.

If the current month ended today the Dow Jones Industrial Index would be down 9.4% and have locked in the worst June since 1930. Check the following chart, coursey of Paul Kedrosky, for the painful picture.

“Granted, June 2008 is not in the top 30 bad months of all time, so let’s keep our

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This screened ETF list is based on a combination of features that are often requested by more cautious equity investors:

funds with history and reasonable liquidity acceptable expense ratios for the type of portfolio not too much volatility for the return some current yield better total returns than bonds

The funds in the list are not recommendations. They are simply idea possibilities for do-it-yourself investors who may find the particular screening criteria useful.

The funds do not represent a full spread of the asset classes which we believe should be in a well designed portfolio.

The universe from which they were filtered is the entire database of hundreds of ETFs at www.IndexUniverse.com.

Important Note:

The fact that cautious investors ask the kinds of questions on which the filter is based, does not mean the funds that make it through the filter are conservative or necessarily good investments. In fact, some

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