Intro

Yahoo

AIG

Citigroup

Winners

The oil market has been red hot lately. It's up $10 a barrel the last week and jumped again on Friday to a record $126 on fears the U.S. would have to levy sanctions against Venezuela for the reported possible ties between its leader, Hugo Chavez, and Colombian rebels. Increases like that are also jacking up the price of gasoline to record levels just as consumers are focusing on the summer vacation season around the corner. The

United States Gasoline ETF

Oil also played a part in the returns of some of the week's big winners Russia and emerging Eastern Europe. (A new president in Russia also helped.) Market Vectors Russia, an ETF that primarily owns energy companies like Lukoil and Gazprom, gained 10.1% the last five trading sessions. This fund has returned 36.4% over the last year. The SPDR S&P Emerging Europe fund, which has 68% of its assets in Russia and the rest spread throughout countries like Czech Republic, Turkey, Hungary and Poland, increased 8.6% this week.

Losers

On the other side of the globe, though, things weren't as sweet. Inflation worries in India and China, along with poor earnings announcements in Japan from bellwethers like

Toyota

The iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 fund dropped 2.7% Friday. The iPath MSCI India exchange-traded note decreased 7.7% during the previous week.

The Week's Industry Headlines

Launching Pad:

Index Universe is reporting that ETFs now have exposure to platinum through two new funds from UBS. Click

to see the site's take on these products.

Van Eck announced trading off the Market Vectors Double Long Euro and Market Vectors Double Short Euro exchange-traded notes. These two funds allow investors to make leveraged and short bets against the direction of the euro/U.S. dollar exchange rate.

In Registration: ProShares has done well with leveraged and short ETFs that try to double the returns of a given index or post double the inverse returns of that same benchmark. Now, though, competing fund family Direxion is taking that idea a step further with ETFs that will try to triple the returns of their underlying index. The firm recently registered 36 ETFs with the SEC that will go long or short benchmarks that focus on Japan, real estate, home builders, midcaps and emerging markets, just to name a few. No word on when they will start trading.

And the Winner Is...: Clear Indexes announced the winner of its "Next Generation ETF Contest" that challenges students at selected schools to come up with a new fund idea in the hopes of winning $5,000. Two York University students came up with an idea for a global sports fund that focuses on the publicly-traded equities of holding companies that own professional athletic teams. The students also win an internship with Clear and a chance to see their idea turn into a viable fund.

Next Week's Notebook

Earnings

Monday: A.C. Moore, Bally Technologies, BearingPoint, Carmike Cinemas, Century Casinos, Charter, Clearwire, Compton Petroleum, Doral Financial, FirstCity Financial, Fluor Corp., Hawk, Houston Wire & Cable, Imax, IndyMac Bancorp, JA Solar, MBIA, McDermott, PetMed Express, Radyne Corp., Sirius Satellite Radio, Southwest Water, Sprint Nextel, Stifel Financial, Valspar, Warnaco, Winn-Dixie, XM Satellite

Tuesday: Applied Materials, Carrefour, Comverge, Consolidated Water, Echostar, Electronic Arts, Fossil, Helen of Troy, Liz Claiborne, Pioneer Drilling, TJX, Walmart, Whole Foods

Wednesday: Agilent Technologies, ArcelorMittal, Comstock Homebuilding, Deere & Company, Freddie Mac, Jack in the Box, Macy's, Sina Corp, Sony, Stanley, Steak N' Shake

Thursday: Advance Auto Parts, Autodesk, Blockbuster, BMC Software, Compuserve, Hewlett-Packard, J.C. Penney, Kohls, Nordstrom, The Blackstone Group, Urban Outfitters

Friday: Abercrombie & Fitch, Bronco Drilling

Economic Data

Tuesday: Chain Store Sales (7:45 a.m.), Import Prices (8:30 a.m.), Retail & Food Sales (8:30 a.m.), Business Inventories (10 a.m.), Consumer Confidence (5 p.m.)

Wednesday: Consumer Price Index (8:30 a.m.), CPI ex-food and energy (8:30 a.m.)

Thursday: Jobless Claims (8:30 a.m.), New York Fed Manufacturing (8:30 a.m.), International Capital Flows (9 a.m.), Industrial Production (9:15 a.m.), Philadelphia Fed Business Index (10 a.m.), Business Barometer (10 a.m.) Housing Market Index (1 p.m.)

Friday: April Housing Starts (8:30 a.m.)

Quick Take

A look at how the industry's most popular ETFs did on Friday.