The Financials sector ranks last out of the ten sectors as detailed in my Sector Rankings for ETFs and Mutual Funds report. It gets my Dangerous rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 43 ETFs and 232 mutual funds in the Financials sector as of April 24, 2013. Prior reports on the best & worst ETFs and mutual funds in every sector and style are here.

Figures 1 and 2 show the five best and worst-rated ETFs and mutual funds in the sector. Not all Financial sector ETFs and mutual funds are created the same. The number of holdings varies widely (from 21 to 523), which creates drastically different investment implications and ratings. The best ETFs and mutual funds allocate more value to Attractive-or-better-rated stocks than the worst ETFs and mutual funds, which allocate too much value to Neutral-or-worse-rated stocks.

To identify the best and

By Doug Friedenberg

While waiting for the power to go out (which it did a couple of hours later) as we sat at home in Connecticut and Sandy approached, we read this comment by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker Blog ('Watching Sandy, Ignoring Climate Change'):

As with any particular "weather-related loss event," it's impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change. Just a few weeks before the Munich Re report appeared, scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the apparent increase in extreme heat waves. Extreme summertime heat, which just a few decades ago

Hurricane Sandy, the perfect storm or "Frankenstorm," is expected to leave billions in damages along its wake as it ravages through the Northeast. When the markets start trading again, sector exchange traded funds investors will have to keep an eye on a couple of key areas.

Trang Ho for Investor's Business Daily outlines five sectors that could take the brunt of the damage.

Homebuilders. According to CoreLogic, almost 284,000 residential properties across seven states lie across Sandy's path. The sector may benefit the most as home owners repair damages.

• Shares Dow Jones US Home Construction Index Fund (ITB)
• SPDR S&P Homebuilders (XHB)

Airlines. Currently, observers estimate between 9,000 to 12,600 flights cancelled as airliners grounded flights because of mother nature. According to the Global Business Travel Association, storm-related cancellations could cost the industry $606 million in lost spending and up to $58 million per day in lost