30-June-2024: USA: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

Source: CNBC; see link above, at the top of this post.

The green line is the 30-stock Dow Jones Industrial Average, a.k.a. "The Dow", the black line is the S&P500, and the green line is the NASDAQ Composite index (IXIC). Their relative performance compared to our market is listed in a table below in this post.

The US FY runs from January to December, so in the excerpt below they talk about the first half, meaning the 6 months to June 30, 2024:

And now the ASX:

Chart data sourced from Commsec.

As expected, due to our overweight materials and financials market sectors compared to the US who are overweight IT (tech) - and not just any tech, the world's best tech, the Aussie indices underperformed the US once again, with our ASX200 (XJO) slightly outperforming the Aussie All Ords (XAO) and the Aussie Small Ords (XSO) index underperforming, although there were periods during the year when the Small Ords did get above the others for brief periods. I've added the Aussie gold index (XGD) in there for myself mostly and the few members here who are interested in the Aussie gold sector. Gold was clearly WAY more volatile, but ended the year ahead of the others.

Still, another positive year, and most of them are, so onwards and upwards.

Here's Marcus Padley's Marcus Today Newsletter table (from Saturday's newsletter) showing relative performance over the past 12 months:

The Sectors are the Aussie market sectors.

The following table shows how our ASX20 performed:

I would argue that both Block and Newmont should not be there, as they are not Australian companies, but nobody seems to care about that...

Here's Marcus' winners and losers list tables for FY24:

And if you prefer passive investing to active investing...

Tables were sourced from: MarcusToday.com.au

The average gains seem higher than the average losses there - in those ETFs - but the message seems to be that if you're going to go with a so-called "smart" ETF, or a specialised one that only invests in a single sector, choose carefully. Some of those on the right may have appealed to investors who wanted to "go green" or be more ethically-invested, but they didn't work out so well. Sometimes the basket approach (or buying the haystack instead of looking for the needle - as Jack Bogle used to say) isn't the best strategy, certainly not when it comes to individual industries - there will be winners and losers - why try to hold all of them? The approach clearly does work OK at times, as the left side of that table above shows, but the right side demonstates that it doesn't ALWAYS work. Sometimes you just have to put in the hours and do the work.