The Bull Market's Best-Performing Mid-Cap ETF

The current bull market for U.S. stocks turns eight this week, providing investors with an ideal opportunity to look back on some of the best-performing stocks and exchange-traded funds over the past eight years.

This bull market's best-performing mid-cap ETF is the Guggenheim S&P MidCap 400 Pure Value ETF RFV. Since the start of this bull market on March 10, 2009, RFV has produced average annualized returns of just over 27 percent and a cumulative return of 575.4 percent, according to Morningstar data.

Profiling RFV

RFV, which debuted in March 2006, follows the S&P MidCap 400 Pure Value Index, the value answer to the widely followed S&P MidCap 400.

“S&P Pure Value Indices include only those components of the parent index that exhibit strong value characteristics, and weights them by value score. Constituents are drawn from the S&P MidCap 400,” according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

While RFV has thwarted competing ETFs that track the traditional S&P MidCap 400 since the start of the current bull market, the Guggenheim ETF has had average annualized volatility of 23.7 percent over that period. That is about 450 basis points than the average annualized volatility found on ETFs that track the S&P MidCap 400. However, RFV has outpaced those ETFs by a wide enough margin that its risk-adjusted returns are superior.

RFV currently holds 98 stocks, or just under a quarter of the membership of the standard S&P MidCap 400. The ETF devotes almost 24 percent of its weight to consumer discretionary stocks and nearly a combined 32 percent to the financial services and technology sectors. No stock accounts for more than 2.5 percent of RFV's lineup and the ETF's top 10 holdings combine for just over 16 percent of the fund's weight.

Investors prescient enough to have invested $10,000 in RFV on March 10, 2009, and still holding the ETF today would be sitting on more than $67,500. The ETF is one of several Guggenheim offerings found among the 10 best non-leveraged ETFs of this bull market.

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