How to Navigate the Year's Worst Trading Period

For most Americans, May is little more than the prelude to summer. In addition to the longer days, warmer weather and summer blockbuster hoopla, May is also a time when stocks begin to suffer.

"May really starts the worst six months of the year to own stocks," said Todd Shriber, Benzinga's own ETF Professor. "A lot of folks who aren't familiar with ETFs don't realize that one of the primary advantages of ETFs is that it removes the stock-picking burden. So rather than an investor trying to figure out what are the best single stocks to own at any given time, really the advantage of stock ETFs is that you only need to be right about the sector, you don't need to be right about an individual name."

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is "a great example of that," he said.

"You could still make money in certain tech ETFs this year, although tech has been a laggard sector," said Shriber. "Had you owned Apple, obviously you would have gotten creamed."

Todd Shriber will be speaking at the 2013 MoneyShow at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada. Scheduled to take place from May 13 through May 16, MoneyShow will bring together dozens of the brightest minds in trading.

"Investors are going to get a lot of different perspectives," said Shriber. "That's very helpful in the type of market environment that we're shaping up to see this year. Things are definitely still volatile out there. Economic recovery in the U.S. and in China, in particular, is fragile at best."

Shriber said that one of the best reasons to attend the Vegas MoneyShow event is to "learn about alternative ways to protect yourself [and] to find new ways to profit in a volatile market environment in 2013, beyond the usual suspects of stocks that people kind of rely on."

"Obviously I do spend nearly all of my time focused on ETFs," said Shriber. "We got off to a really great start during the first couple of months of the year, but recently we started to see some decay to the returns earlier in the year and now, actually the timing of the MoneyShow is perfect."

Shriber thinks that this is a "really good time to consider short-term trades in some of the inverse ETFs that are out there, and that is much more practical trading and owning those ETFs, rather than trying to short individual stocks directly."

"That is far more risky than owning an inverse ETF," said Shriber.

Louis Bedigian is the Senior Tech Analyst and Features Writer of Benzinga. You can reach him at 248-636-1322 or louis(at)benzingapro(dot)com. Follow him @LouisBedigianBZ