'Cubes' Drops Into 'Also Ran' Territory

If there is one thing worse than always being in second place, it is consistently ranking second only to slide into "also ran" territory.

That sums up what happened in December to the PowerShares QQQ(QQQQ Quote) exchange-traded fund in TheStreet.com Ratings' monthly ranking of the 20 most popular ETFs.

The tech-heavy QQQQ, nicknamed the "Cubes" by traders, tracks the Nasdaq-100 Index, which comprises 100 of the largest non-financial companies that trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Since time immemorial, the Cubes have monopolized the second spot in ETF trading to the hugely popular SPRD S&P 500 ETF(SPY Quote), nicknamed "Spider." But in the December tally of average ETF daily dollar value of turnover, QQQQ tumbled from its seemingly perpetual second position to fifth on the list, as can be seen in the accompanying table.

Even though QQQQ advanced 2.28% in December, prolonged atrophy in the tech sector caused its average daily dollar volume of trading to shrivel from $6.38 billion in November to $3.91 billion in the year's final month.

QQQQ's top holdings include Microsoft(MSFT Quote), Apple(AAPL Quote), Qualcom(QCOM Quote) and Google(GOOG Quote).

A leveraged version of the Cubes, the ProShares Ultra QQQ(QLD Quote), fared just as poorly. It skidded from 12th spot in the November rankings to 16th in December.

Even a "leveraged-inverse" version of the Nasdaq-100 couldn't attract additional investor interest. The ProShares Ultra Short QQQ(QID Quote) slipped from sixth-most-popular in November to eighth.

Rejuvenated interest in the long-suffering mid-cap sector propelled the SPDR Mid Cap 400(MDY Quote) from 19th position in November to second place last month. The ETF's average daily dollar volume vaulted from $1.07 billion to $6.06 billion.