Sure enough, as soon as the media (and I) make a point of a market anomaly, the market turns! No sooner did I make a blog post titled, “Growth versus Value Redux” on August 4, highlighting the tremendous underperformance of the value versus growth style of equity investing we have seen recently and over the past 10 + years, the value style picked up some lost ground!
As seen from the chart below, the value style ETF (IVE, the purple line on top) made a big pop on August 5 and surpassed the growth style (IVW, the blue line) through month-to-date on August 10 with a return of 3.5% compared to the growth and S&P 500 (IVV, the bold black line) returns of 2.2% and 2.8%. We haven’t been able to say that for a while!
There is no telling if this is the beginning of a trend, but since the growth style has been bid up so much during the stock market recovery, the value style does seem ripe for a catch-up trade. As always, best to be broadly diversified.