TGN Bull Extends, Plus 2025 Mid-Year Review

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.

 

Here’s summary of S&P 500 full-cycle performance going back nearly a century, comprising seven full cycles:

 

Here’s breakout of bear and bull markets for each of those same seven cycles:

 

Here’s summary for several key indexes plus BRKA for each of those same seven cycles, followed by plot of returns since start or current The Great Normalization cycle in January 2022:

 

 

TGN Bull Runs! Plus, Year-end Review 2024

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”

Flows! Plus, MFO Mid-Year Review 2024

All fund risk and return metrics, ratings, and analytics were uploaded to MFO Premium, Saturday, 29 June, reflecting performance through mid-year. Our latest fund flow data were uploaded yesterday, Monday, 8 July. Refinitiv drops the flow data on the 1st and 3rd Saturday of each month.

 

We’ve scheduled our mid-year review webinar this Wednesday (tomorrow), 10 July at 11 am Pacific (2pm Eastern). It will highlight performance of funds across different market segments and showcase various search features since our year-end webinar, which include:

 

  • MFO Flows, short for fund asset flows, is a significant upgrade this year (click example below for Fidelity’s Total Bond Fund ETF),
  • A new Analytics user interface, which allows users to jump quickly across various tools, like Return Chart, Flows, Correlation, Ferguson, Momentum, and Calendar Year Drawdown,
  • ETF Benchmarks, championed by our MFO colleague Devesh Shah.

Continue reading “Flows! Plus, MFO Mid-Year Review 2024”

December Brings S&P 500 To All-Time High

All fund risk and return metrics, ratings, and analytics were uploaded to MFO Premium Saturday, 30 December, reflecting performance through year-end. We used Refinitiv’s Friday data drop, which was last business day of year, to get an early peek at 2023 calendar year performance.

 

We’ve scheduled our year-in-review webinar this Friday, 5 January. It will highlight performance of funds across different market segments and attempt to showcase various search features, including additions since our mid-year webinar. There will be just one session this year at 9 am Pacific (noon Eastern). Join us if you can in the New Year by registering here. And here is link to chart deck for session.

Continue reading “December Brings S&P 500 To All-Time High”

Our World – Fund Demographics

The series of charts below summarizes latest fund demographics. Simple tally of funds by asset universe, shares class, type, subtype, fund category, and other (e.g., interval funds, ESG funds). Reflects current data on MFO Premium, which is derived from Refinitiv Lipper Global Data Feed (LGDF), dated Friday, 7 July 2023. Included a couple charts on assets under management (AUM), which will be somewhat elevated over actual since includes fund of funds … but, they appear to give reasonable sense of absolute and relative size.


Continue reading “Our World – Fund Demographics”

Best Performing Funds Since COVID

All fund risk and return metrics, ratings, and analytics were uploaded to MFO Premium on Sunday 2 July, reflecting performance through June.
 
Concurrent with the new cycle, described in this month’s MFO piece “Strong June Propels New Bull Market,” we introduced additional Display Period options in MultiSearch. The new periods include those covering The Great Normalization (TGN) cycle (full, bear, and bull … still on-going) and another named “Since COVID.” The latter reflects performance since January 2020, when the world turned upside down with the onset of coronavirus (COVID). Things have not been the same since.
 
Continue reading “Best Performing Funds Since COVID”

June Bloom: Welcome a New Bull Market

All fund risk and return metrics, ratings, and analytics were uploaded to MFO Premium yesterday, reflecting performance through May. The update uses Lipper’s Friday data drop, so return and drawdown performance is available through 2 June using our new Month To Date (MTD) display period.
 
Despite pervasive skepticism based on: Russian invasion. China US tension. Inflation. Rising rates. Bank collapses. Default fears. The S&P 500 has been climbing generally since October or 8 months ago. Month ending data has us 2% shy of a new bull market. But if you include MTD, the S&P is up more than 20%, which meets the definition. We’ll coin it The Great Normalization (TGN) Bull … the 7th bull market for S&P 500 since Vietnam War circa 1968.
 
Continue reading “June Bloom: Welcome a New Bull Market”

2022 Year-End Review Webinar

Thank you all for attending our year-end webinar! Here is link to video recording.

 

All fund risk and return metrics, ratings, and analytics were uploaded to MFO Premium on New Year’s Day, reflecting performance through December. Similar to October, we used Lipper’s Friday data drop, which was last business day of year, to get an early peek at 2022 year-end performance.

 

We’ve scheduled our year-in-review webinar this Friday (tomorrow), 6 January. It will highlight performance of funds across different market segments and attempt to showcase various search features, including additions since our mid-year webinar.

 
Continue reading “2022 Year-End Review Webinar”