New York: The last thing a diversified fund manager wants is to run a portfolio dominated by just seven technology companies – all American, all mega-cap, clustered in the same corner of the economy.
Yet as the S&P 500 pushed to fresh records last week, investors were again forced to confront a painful reality: Keeping pace with the market has largely meant owning little else.
A small, tightly linked group of tech super stocks accounted for an outsize share of returns this year, extending a pattern in place for the better part of a decade.
What stood out wasn’t simply that the winners remained largely the same, but the degree to which the gap started to seriously strain investor patience.
Frustration dictated how money moved.
Around US$1 trillion was pulled from active equity mutual funds over the year, according to estimates from Bloomberg Intelligence using Investment Company Institute data, marking an 11th year of net outflows and, by some measures, the steepest of the cycle.
By contrast, passive equity exchange-traded funds got more than US$600bil.
The exits happened gradually as the year progressed, with investors reassessing whether to pay for portfolios that looked meaningfully different from the index, only to be forced to live with the consequences when that difference didn’t pay off.
“The concentration makes it harder for active managers to do well,” said Dave Mazza, chief executive officer of Roundhill Investments. “If you do not benchmark weight the Magnificent Seven, then you’re likely taking risk of underperformance.”
Contrary to pundits who thought they saw an environment where stock picking could shine, it was a year in which the cost of deviating from the benchmark remained stubbornly high.
On many days in the first half of the year, fewer than one in five stocks rose alongside the broader market, according to data compiled by BNY Investments.
Narrow participation isn’t unusual in itself, but its persistence matters. When gains are repeatedly driven by a tiny few, spreading bets more widely stops helping and starts hurting relative performance.
The same dynamic was visible at the index level.
Throughout the year, the S&P 500 outperformed its equal-weighted version, which assigns the same importance to a smallish retailer as it does to Apple Inc.
For investors assessing active strategies, that translated into a simple arithmetic problem: Choose one that is underweight the largest stocks and risk falling behind, or go with another that holds them in close proportion to the index, and struggle to justify paying for an approach that is little different than a passive fund.
In the United States, 73% of equity mutual funds have trailed their benchmarks this year, according Bloomberg’s Athanasios Psarofagis, the fourth most in data going back to 2007.
The underperformance worsened after the recovery from April’s tariff scare as enthusiasm over artificial intelligence (AI) cemented leadership for the tech cohort.
There were exceptions, but they required investors to accept very different risks.
One of the most striking came from Dimensional Fund Advisors LP, whose US$14bil International Small Cap Value Portfolio returned just over 50% this year, outpacing not only its benchmark but also the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100.
The structure of that portfolio is telling. It holds roughly 1,800 stocks, almost all outside the United States, with heavy exposure to financials, industrials and materials.
Rather than trying to navigate around the US large-cap index, it largely stepped outside it.
“This year provides a really good lesson,” said Joel Schneider, the firm’s deputy head of portfolio management for North America. “Everyone knows that global diversification makes sense, but it’s really hard to stay disciplined and actually maintain that. Choosing yesterday’s winners is not the right approach.”
One manager who stuck with her convictions was Margie Patel of the Allspring Diversified Capital Builder Fund, which has returned some 20% this year thanks to bets on chipmakers Micron Technology Inc and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
“A lot of people like to be closet or quasi indexers. They like to have some exposure in all sectors even if they’re not convinced that they are going to outperform,” Patel said on Bloomberg TV.
In contrast, her view is that “the winners are going to stay winners”.
The propensity of big stocks to get bigger made 2025 a banner year for would-be bubble hunters.
The Nasdaq 100 trades at more than 30 times earnings and around six times sales, at or near historical highs.
Dan Ives, the Wedbush Securities analyst who started an AI-focused ETF (IVES) this year and saw it swell to nearly US$1bil, said valuations like those may test nerves, but are no reason to bail on the theme.
“There are going to be white-knuckle moments. That just creates the opportunities,” he said in an interview.
“We believe this tech bull market goes for another two years. To us, it’s about trying to find who the derivative beneficiaries are, and that’s how we’re going to continue to navigate this fourth industrial revolution from an investing perspective.”
Other successes leaned into concentration of a different kind.
VanEck’s Global Resources Fund returned almost 40% this year, benefitting from demand linked to alternative energy, agriculture and base metals.
The fund, launched in 2006, owns companies such as Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp and Barrick Mining Corp, and is run by teams that include geologists and engineers alongside financial analysts.
“When you are an active manager, it allows you to pursue big themes,” said Shawn Reynolds, who has managed the fund for 15 years, a geologist himself. But that approach, too, demands conviction and tolerance for volatility – qualities that many investors have shown less appetite for after several years of uneven results.
By the end of this year, the lesson for investors was not that active management had stopped working, nor that the index had solved the market.
It was simpler, and more uncomfortable. After another year of concentrated gains, the price of being different remained high, and for many, the willingness to keep paying it had worn thin.
Still, Osman Ali of Goldman Sachs Asset Management believes there is “alpha” to be found not just in Big Tech.
The global co-head of quantitative investment strategies relies on the firm’s proprietary model, which ranks and analyses roughly 15,000 stocks worldwide daily.
The system, built around the team’s investment philosophy, has helped deliver gains of some 40% across its international large-cap, international small-cap and tax-managed funds on a total return basis.
“The markets will always give you something,” he said, “You just have to look in a very dispassionate, data-driven way.” — Bloomberg