QQQ: A Few More Rounds, Maybe

The Invesco QQQ Trust. It’s done alright for itself. A total return of 560% over the last decade, as of February 13th. Ten thousand dollars, put in a while back, would be sixty-six thousand now. Not bad. Not bad at all. So it goes.

You’re probably thinking it’s too late to join the party. And you’d be right, mostly. But things are…shifting. It’s a slow, quiet kind of shift, like continental drift, but with more paperwork.

Last year, 2023, something funny happened. More money went into funds that just are the market – the passive ones – than into funds where people try to beat the market. That’s new. For a long time, people paid others to pick stocks, hoping for magic. Now they just buy everything. A chart shows this, of course. Charts always show something. They’re good for that.

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Commission-free trading helped. So did all the research available online. Suddenly, everyone was a stock picker, or at least pretended to be. It’s democratic, in a way. Though democracy, as anyone will tell you, is messy. And usually disappointing.

Active managers, for the most part, haven’t been doing so hot. People noticed. They started putting their money where the money already was. It makes a sort of grim sense. And this trend isn’t stopping. Not yet. The QQQ, it benefits from this. It just sits there, holding pieces of everything, and people keep giving it more pieces. It’s a simple life.

I’m not saying it’ll go up forever. Nothing does. The market will do what the market wants, which is usually to surprise you. But this flow of money into passive funds…it’s a tailwind. A gentle push. And for those patient enough to wait, it might add a few more rounds to the game. It’s not a fortune, probably. Just a little something to keep the lights on. So it goes.

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2026-02-17 01:02