The Passive & Indexing Desk 10 stories this week · 74 total

XLE was August's best sector fund, but the gain ran through oilfield services and refiners, not its integrated-major core.

A 3% 10-year JGB yield — a level not seen since 1996 — makes Goldman's 16-basis-point ultra-short fund the test case for active short-duration wrappers.

The fund's 20.39% year-to-date gain, the firm argues, comes from copied insider buys and buybacks, not just cheap foreign stocks.

The tech-heavy book supplied 9.27 of the 10.7 points, leaving 1.43 for everything else.

A $160 million emerging-markets ETF is beating cap-weighting with fundamental weights and dynamic factor tilts; now it has to win shelf space.

The free-cash-flow ETF's June reconstitution shows what the screen buys, what it cuts, and why the rules do the managing.

The 2x daily objective sits over a concentrated index of Chinese platforms paying for AI infrastructure — a powerful trade for days, a poor position for years.

An $11.3 million experiment in 1976 became the default way trillions are now invested.

A sector-level equal-weight fund like EQL lets advisors trim the S&P 500's concentration without the tax bill of a full reconstruction.

Sprott's SETM sells diversification, but the demand story is the energy grid.

The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF hit $100 billion, a flows story about concentration risk more than performance.

A supply-timing move, not a deficit fix, steers the long-end trade toward the wrapper.

Non-auto sectors now drive robot adoption, and thematic ETFs are the hook for an automation cycle that may only be starting.

Flows into VGK, IEUR, BBEU and OPPE are repricing European funds for their industrial, financial and infrastructure overweights.

The Tweedy, Browne active ETF screens for insider purchases and buybacks; its 20.30% YTD gain is a strong start, but the screen is unproven over a full cycle.

A 94% correlation between factory job openings and robot installations a year later makes U.S. automation demand forecastable and sets physical-AI exposure apart from the slower humanoid story.

A content-hub article pitches insider-led international value, with ICPY up 12.87%. It never proves the neglect.

The conditional loan puts federal money behind an REXC holding as Washington's $3 billion critical-minerals push takes shape.

Rob Arnott's fundamental indexing now sits behind TMX VettaFi's push for $1 trillion in index assets.

A new contracting cycle in Europe and the US could tighten uranium supplies just as demand accelerates, supporting prices and the case for URNM.

A biotech index, a cash-flow screen and a value tilt offer different ways to ride the small-cap benchmark's new high.

WisdomTree's HYZD runs a 0.22-year duration hedge over a BB-heavy book. Its sponsor says plain high-yield beta no longer cuts it.

The AI chip maker is 20.6% below its 52-week high; Direxion's inverse fund and its 2x bull fund are wagers on which catalyst runs out first.

Sterling Infrastructure had gained 114% in three months. GFLW's June rebalance cut the stake nearly in half and pushed the fund's beta to 1.02.

Spot gold is back near $4,400. Operating leverage and historically low valuations are spreading the rally from bullion to the companies that dig it up.

ELFY is up 22% year to date. Industrial and energy holdings, not the utility stake, are driving the gain, which is about six times a typical utilities benchmark's return.

BMI expects lithium prices to drift lower in the second half. BATT's China sleeve, at more than 30%, makes that a local problem.

The fund's two-step rule — free-cash-flow selection, risk-adjusted momentum weighting — overrode a hot stock's rally.

The IVI series gives the FTSE 100 and FTSE MIB a VIX-style gauge and could become the benchmark for future volatility ETFs.

A DWS survey finds 26% of pension funds now prefer ETFs for passive exposure.