Large-cap US stocks favoured by exchange traded funds have underperformed the wider market in recent years, raising fears that “crowding” in popular companies is damaging returns. Analysis of the constituents of the S&P 100 by Vincent Deluard, global macro strategist at StoneX, a New York-based brokerage, found that since 2018 the stocks most owned by ETFs have tended to perform worse that those more lightly held by such funds. Deluard’s research adds some credence to the arguments of some value investors that the rise of ETFs is just the latest example of “the madness of crowds” and that price-insensitive index funds create “passive bubbles” by piling into the same momentum-driven stocks, only for these bubbles to then burst.
