HANOVER, NH (ETFguide.com) - March came in like a lion, albeit in bear's clothing.  It will go out a lamb.  April, the cruelest month, will breed lilacs, mixing memory and desire.  Stores will close; stores will open.  The stock market will go into rehab.

Well-traveled people, like Jim Rogers, believe the growth in commodity prices are here to stay.  The only successful stock brokers, he says, will be those driving tractors.  If you believe that, get PowerShares DB Agriculture ETF (NYSEArca: DBA).   In the past weeks its been growing, not quickly like a weed, but slowly, like your child's bean plant withering on a Kindergarten windowsill. 

Certainly, if the world goes the way of Mad Max, commodities will be king, but you won't be reading about it here.  The world's data centers will have been overrun by vandals looking to smelt out gold from PC chips. Don't tell that to the Technology Select Sector SPDR (NYSEArca: XLK). It's down just 11.4% year-to-date versus the S&P 500's (NYSEArca: SPY) 22.4% decline making it the best S&P industry sector right now. In the past few weeks XLK's been creating more shares. 

The invisible hand of the market has come out from behind the curtain, and like the Wizard of Oz, is very human.  Our wanton consumption has caught up with us.  Now, instead of one wizard, we have many, preparing balloons full of bailout bills and stimulus money.  But they'll loosen from their moorings, taking their wizards with them.  For those who believe the market will ignore Obama The Magnificent's ever cloudier oratory, how about  the Dow DIAMONDS (NYSEArca: DIA)?

We are becoming a nation of Dorothies. We 'want to go home, Auntie M,' to family, education, and an easy-access storm cellar.  How do we know these things are important?  We're losing them, as a snot-nosed brat might say, "for real."  Like children, we have not taken the news well.  We've done to our financial markets what a child does to their room when desires meet illiquid markets.  But after we sleep it off, we'll clean up our room and make it better.

All the gold-bugs and commodity-nuts (NYSEArca: DBC) forget.  Natural resources are inherently limited in their ability to grow wealth.  They're limited by a simple fact.  You can only eat so much rice or wheat.  When the price of oil drops, you don't heat your house to 150 degrees, or get in your car and drive across the country and back.  This isn't to say commodities won't rise.  But at certain point, just like our recent experience with oil, they will come back to Earth, pun intended.  And what if they do keep rising?  What if farmers and miners become richer than last-week's Greenwich hedge funder?  What will they do with their money then? 

Wealth always ends up in the hands of innovators and market expanders.  Recently, a book on the history of salt was published.  Did people make money selling salt?  No.  Each country made money by using salt to preserve their fish or meet for export. Historically, the real value of commodities is their ability to foster trade.   

If you want to re-allocate your investments from soon-to-yellow paper money, to low-cost ETFs and mutual funds, brimming with equity, then this database can help you.

Let's look at the facts, the kind of numbers that haven't made the papers.  A year ago, there was $12 trillion dollars in all mutual funds.  Then stock funds lost $3 trillion.  But one trillion made it safely into money market accounts.  So the net effect is everyone lost $2 trillion, or only 20% of their wealth.  Sure, you may have lost 80% personally, but you're special (like everyone else I know).

If stock funds lose another 50%, if the Dow goes down to 3,500, that would be another $1.7 trillion lost.  That would put everyone's wealth, in mutual funds, down to 65% of it's original value.  Bad, but it would hardly wipe us out.  Most people with savings have already protected themselves by switching to trillions in cash (which they'll one day regret).

Back to Armageddon.

The above chart compares the ETF shares outstanding (not their value, but share count), between now and six months ago.  If the market is mortally wounded, wouldn't we see some trauma here?  All I can see is growth in  capitalist markets, a la ETFs.   

In November investors took $3.5 billion out of high yield funds.  Then they took another billion in December.  But January they bought $350 million. In February, the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate (NYSEarca: HYG)  created shares.  Indeed, it's been growing handsomely since it debuted.  So has the SPDR Barclays Capital High Yield Bond fund (NYSEarca: JNK). At the end of December, HYG had a yield of 10.56% and JNK was at 13.62%.

How about the goldbug bellweather, SPDR Gold Shares (NYSEArca: GLD)?  Sure, from 2005 through 2007 it did very well.  But Gold rose just modestly in 2008.  Supposedly it just testing bottoms and allowing for profit taking.  No one seems interested in this interpretation. They'd much rather believe that GLD predicted the financial crisis and that gold's bottom is near or here.

In the February, guess what the biggest losers were?  Bear market funds. UltraShort Real Estate ProShares (NYSEArca: SRS) is losing an average of a few million shares a week. Oh what fun times we had with UltraShort Financials ProShares (NYSEArca: SKF).  It's now sleeping one off.

Long ETFs are coming to life.  Short ETFs are shrinking.  It's just a matter of time before the general market follows.  I don't know if the market will come back in May, or some other month.  But 'Rebound in May' rings nicely to my ear.  From sweet melodies are optimism and rebirth borne.

Max Rottersman is a principal of Hanover Technology Group, LLC. His opinions don’t necessarily represent the views of ETFguide.com or Yahoo Finance.