In 2016, after years of underperformance, value stocks staged a comeback. The Russell 3000 Value Index outperformed the Russell 3000 Growth Index by about 11 percentage points for the year. All was right with the world, as relatively cheap stocks once again outperformed their relatively more expensive counterparts.Here's an excerpt of an article I wrote on the topic in January 2016:

Value investing is simple in theory, difficult in practice. Today, value investors find themselves in the middle of a particularly tough stretch. Exhibit 1 is a relative wealth chart that plots the performance of the Russell 3000 Value Index versus the Russell 3000 Growth Index. When the line slopes up, the value index is outperforming. When it slopes down, the growth index is outpe… Full Story

Sustainable investing, which seeks to stay aligned with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles, has become increasingly mainstream in recent years, as noted by my colleague Jon Hale. As a result, an ever-increasing number and variety of ESG-oriented mutual funds are now available to investors. At the same time, lots of money has flowed into passively managed vehicles, such as exchange-traded funds, exchange-traded notes, and open-end index funds, at the expense of actively managed funds. In the first five months of 2017, actively managed funds saw $6 billion in net outflows, while passive funds had $145 billion of net inflows.At the intersection of these two trends are the many sustainable ETFs, ETNs, and index funds that have cropped up in recent years, giving ESG investors many more passive options than they used to h… Full Story