Inflation, Trends, and Market Manipulation

By Charles Lynn Bolin

This past week has seen some significant market turmoil as the yield on 10-year treasuries climbed quickly to 1.5% while the S&P 500 dipped 2.5% on Thursday, February 25th. I show the Moving Average Convergence Divergence indicator below. The trends are short-term bearish. In this article, I focus on funds that lost less than a half percent on Thursday and were trending up over the past several months for clues on where to invest with the possibility of inflation rising.

This article is divided into four sections for those Continue reading →

Considering the “ESG bubble”

By David Snowball

ESG funds drew over $50 billion of net inflows in 2020, more than double their gains in 2019, according to Morningstar. On the whole, they performed splendidly.

A particularly surprising finding is that ESG-screened funds perform exceptionally well in sharp market corrections, both in market crashes between 2000-2011 and in the 2020 Covid crash. While such funds might marginally trail broader markets in good times, their down-market performance gives them an attractive long-term profile.

A panicked crowd immediately gathered and Continue reading →

Introducing “Dashboard of Launch Alerts”

By Charles Boccadoro

This new tool went live on our MFO Premium site this past month.
 

The Launches Dashboard compiles and tracks funds first appearing in our “Launch Alert” feature of the monthly MFO commentary. It follows a format similar to the Profiles Dashboard but lists funds by alert date, most recent on top to oldest on the bottom, since MFO launched in May 2011.

Hundreds of new funds are launched annually (e.g., 590 in 2020), but most are not worth mentioning. David highlights just a dozen or so each year.

Continue reading →

Launch Alert: Humankind US Stock ETF 

By David Snowball

In the normal course of events, we screen the fund universe (which includes active ETFs) for intriguing options which had debuted in the preceding three months. In general, that means reviewing “Funds in Registration” columns from the preceding quarter, as well as screening MFO Premium and Morningstar databases.

We arrived at this fund Continue reading →

Funds in Registration

By David Snowball

The Securities and Exchange Commission, by law, gets between 60 and 75 days to review proposed new funds before they can be offered for sale to the public. Each month we survey actively managed funds and ETFs in the pipeline. The “actively-managed” proviso allows us to avoid the pain of reporting on the endless array of ETFs that have commissioned indices of … oh, SPACs plus cannabis or cryptocurrencies plus hotel stocks or stocks also loved by Gamestop investors. (The examples are hypothetical but still representative of the idiocy of the moment.) This month brings 15 new products in the pipeline, most of which will Continue reading →

Manager Changes, January and February 2021

By Chip

Fund managers matter, sometimes more than others. As more teams adopt the mantra, “we’re a team,” if only as window-dressing, more than more manager changes are reduced to “one cog out, one cog in.” Nonetheless, we know that losing funds with new managers tend to outperform losing funds that hold onto their teams, while the opposite is true for winning funds. Strong funds with stable teams and stable assets outperform strong funds facing instability (Bessler et al., 2010). Because of the great volatility of their asset class, equity managers matter rather more than fixed-income investors.

January and February saw changes that affected about 134 funds. Among the most Continue reading →

Briefly Noted

By David Snowball

Updates

On the value of actual human intelligence: The decade’s biggest fund scandal broke on Monday when the SEC accused the advisor of Infinity Q Diversified Alpha Fund (IQDNX) of “adjusting the methodology for obtaining certain asset valuations.” James Velissaris, founder and CIO, was placed on administrative leave while the investigation continues.

The remnants of the fund’s website describe it this Continue reading →

February 1, 2021

By David Snowball

The Delights of January

I’m writing this on the final day of my January (aka J-term) class, Advertising and Consumer Culture. The course, like Propaganda, falls within the purview of my academic specialty, mass persuasion and compliance-gaining. It starts with the deceptively simple query: what might the consequences be of hearing the same message – you should be dissatisfied with your life, you need more! – 100,000 times?

Not to keep you in suspense but “not good.”

I approached the class with a sense of Continue reading →

Which Way to Sherwood Forest?

By Edward A. Studzinski

Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability.

Robert Hilliard Barrow (1922-2008), a former United States Marine Corps commandant and general, interview published in the San Diego Union on November 11, 1979.

A year that started out gangbusters in terms of market appreciation, without regards to valuations, has subsequently started having hiccups on and off. That begs the question as to whether it is now recognized that valuations are stretched? Or perhaps it is a recognition that no matter how many stimulus packages are passed by Congress, flooding the market with money and Continue reading →