MFO Premium

Below is a new plot depicting S&P 500 Resilient Performance across 100-plus years spanning ten market cycles and 16 recessions. I’ve been doing versions of this plot since 2014, seems like, but was inspired to do better after seeing two Morningstar articles with really good graphics: The Beautiful Chart That Busts 3 Stock Market Myths and Stock Market Crashes: A Look at 150 Years of Bear Markets.

You can find all the cycle plots and tables in the new Cycles page.

Created One Hundred Years page, which compiles US stock and bond market risk and return data since January 1926 in single place. The data in this page have formed the basis of several articles and posts on MFO and MFOP on long-term performance and cycles (e.g., Strong June Propels New Bull Market [July 2023]). It will be updated quarterly, at least, in hopes of providing a helpful reference for individual investors, financial advisors, and fund managers.

This chart is one of several on the page that I find fascinating! Particularly the spike in volatility circa 1980.

    

Continue reading “One Hundred Years”

Created new page called Demographics, which provides an aerial view … an Our World of Funds perspective.

Here’s a chart depicting MFO Premium’s Asset Universe …

You will see by the numbers that it’s a big world! Likely bigger than it should be, by count at least.

The Demographics page presents a series of charts that breakout all US-based funds contained in our Lipper Global Data Feed (LGDF): mutual funds, exchange traded funds (ETFs), closed-end funds (CEFs), insurance funds, and exchange traded notes (ETNs), all of which represents the so-called Asset Universe.

Typically, fund count will be broken out in chart on left of page, while the sister chart on the right will breakout assets under management (AUM). The breakouts, which will be updated quarterly, should be helpful to individual investors, financial advisors, and fund managers.

All fund risk and return metrics, ratings, flows, and analytics were uploaded to MFO Premium on Saturday, 3 January, reflecting performance through December 2025 and providing an opportunity to examine year-end market performance.

In 1999, my father Carlo, a beautiful and kind man, asked me to be trustee of his estate. Most of his life savings were in equities, managed by a boutique stockbroker. I asked him about his expectations. He responded quickly: “If my broker does not deliver 20% each year, I fire him.”

And, in fact, in 1995, the S&P returned 37%, followed by 23% in 1996, 33% in 1997, 28% in 1998, and 21% in 1999. These returns set his expectations.

Here is a summary of annual performance of key ETFs for the past four years, which reflects the duration of The Great Normalization market cycle that began January 2022.

Despite the April turbulence brought on by Liberation Day tariff policy, year-end market performance reflected healthy gains in both equities and bonds, US and International. Both SPY and QQQ shared double-digit gains, repeating performance of 2024 and 2023.
Continue reading “A Good Year”

Here are links to chart deck and video …

MFOP 2025 Mid-Year Review Chart Deck

MFOP 2025 Mid-Year Review Webinar Video

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We’ve scheduled our mid-year review webinar for Thursday, 3 July at 11 am Pacific (2pm Eastern). We will use MultiSearch ANALYTICS and PreSet Screens to highlight performance of funds across different market segments. Please join us by registering here.

A couple improvements so far this year:

• Automated evening fund flow downloads from Lipper enabling Daily FLOW Updates, which will depict fund flow, AUM, and return through the previous business day, as applicable.
• Worked with Allan Jardine, creator of DataTables, which drives our search engine, to improve the speed to manipulate very large tables, like MultiSearch (e.g, over 600 columns and 20 rows). Test case improved from 50 seconds to under 1 second!
• Added Trump 2.0 Display Period, which reflects risk and return metrics since January 2025, so should match YTD through rest of year.

June marked the 42nd month of The Great Normalization (TGN) market cycle and the 33rd month of this market’s bull run, including 12 months at all-time highs. The run has propelled the S&P 500 80% so far, netting buy-and-hold investors 37% after the -24% drawdown in 2022. And it extends after the significant intra-month drop from April’s “Liberation Day” announcement. Bonds remain generally depressed.
Continue reading “TGN Bull Extends, Plus 2025 Mid-Year Review”

Thank you all for participating in our 2024 Year-End Review, which included market updates and demos of latest site features.

Here is link to chart deck.

And here’s link to video recording.

Please don’t hesitate to reach-out, always.

All fund risk and return metrics, ratings, and analytics were uploaded to MFO Premium, Saturday, 4 January, reflecting performance through end of year 2024. The upload included fund flow data through Friday, 3 January.

We’ve scheduled our year-end review webinar this Wednesday (tomorrow), 8 January at 11 am Pacific (2pm Eastern). It will highlight performance of funds across different market segments and showcase various search features since our mid-year webinar, which include:

• Introduced “Parent” and “White Label” into MultiSearch and Fund Family Scorecard, as motivated by MFO piece: You Too Can Start an ETF.
• Introduced Price-Based Metrics, as described in our December commentary.
• Expanded Fund Family Scorecard, including family annual revenue based on assets under management and expense ratio.
• Introduced Quarterly Metrics tool, as described in our October commentary.
• Expanded Averages to include peer groups of Category, SubType, Type, and other classifications, like actively managed funds and ETFs (convenience symbols AV-ACTIVE and AV-ETFS, respectively).

Continue reading “TGN Bull Runs! Plus, Year-end Review 2024”