Whither mid-caps? Value?

Such an interesting subject to me, since what has practically been my home page for many years is a chart that keeps tabs of small/mid/large cap vs tech and foreign. But I can only bat around impressions since it is rare I take the trouble to bring in total returns and subdivide by growth and so on.

But my impression is midcap is often king, and carries most of the outperformance of small cap without the downward volatility. See a 5 year chart

you can check various periods which are each very interesting. Ichart against spy sp500: ijj for mid value and ijk for mid growth -compare their xmas colors of red and green. I throw in ijs forsmallcap value which used to be defended on this forum as the oneinefficiently priced category that always won over the long haul. Since midcap growth is so often the winner with big upside and moderate downward volatility, I also throw in my favorite RFG which holds the same stocks except in equal rather than cap weighting. Wow, follow those hot red and especially yellow colors almost always at the top for time periods 3mo, 6mo, 1yr, 2yr, 5yr. See the modest dip of midcaps except for value.

There are parts of the business cycle where some of these are supposed to thrive and others not... maybe someone would like to remind us. Or you can just keep track of the macro trends on a chart like I included, maybe switching to a total return one when you are close to a decision point.

Wow, try hitting "max" time period on that chart, or if you lost it I will repost below. It flips the order of the winners and over the last

10 years of a slight decline of sp500, it shows midcap growth up about 200% and small/mid value up about 400%! Ignore RFG because it's later start is attached to the wrong comparison curve - it actually beats all during it's short lifetime.

Or look at the last 25ish years to see midcaps up about 7fold vs about

5+fold nasdaq, 4fold smallcap and 3+fold sp500. All these numbers take with a grain of salt because they depend on arbitrary endpoints - instead look at the thrust of the curve, and I don't mean mindless extrapolation but nuanced study.

Yes, this graph has irrational elements, but Yahoo is choking on index price retrievals forcing me to enter one index twice and use goofy time periods. You know how to bring up your own more trusted data; this is only quick and dirty brainstorming of themes to confirm elsewhere.

The interactive flash charts of yahoo usually are more powerful, but are quite flakey at the moment. My favorite GLNG shows up totally different on 2 one month charts. One shows it up 5% and another 1 month representing a different account shows it up 50%! I can recognize it as the 3 month chart in that case, but everything else on the chart is 1 month. Must be another downsize week for poor Yahoo...

Dumbstruck, that's nice data.