Markets · Funds
The whole risk ladder in one board
Core index sleeves, sector slices, duration, credit and metals — quoted live, charted live, and explained in the language a desk actually uses when it picks between two funds on the same index.
Group the board by what it actually holds
Ticker families are marketing. These four tabs are how a book is really built: core beta, a rotation slice, duration and credit, and hard assets.
Broad market
Index-tracking core sleeves. Cheap, deep and highly correlated with one another — hold two of these and you mostly hold one position twice.
Sector
Single-slice equity exposure. The cleanest way to express a rotation view without having to pick the winner inside the sector.
Fixed income
Duration and credit sleeves. These react to the rates curve first and the equity tape second — size them against yield and duration, not beta.
Commodity
Hard-asset wrappers. No cash flow and no earnings: the inputs are spot, storage or roll cost, and the dollar. Futures-backed funds are not spot.
Four lines worth knowing by shape
Twelve months of price for the funds most portfolios are measured against. Read them together: when small caps and long duration disagree with the index, the index is being carried by very few names.
SPY
SPDR S&P 500
The reference risk asset. Most equity strategies are ultimately judged against this line.
QQQ
Invesco Nasdaq 100
Large-cap growth concentrated at the top. Higher beta than it looks on a calm week.
IWM
iShares Russell 2000
Small caps. The spread against SPY is the cleanest read on breadth this side of a heatmap.
TLT
iShares 20+ Year Treasury
Long duration. Moves on the rates curve, and its correlation to equities is not a constant.
Three numbers that decide what a fund costs you
Two funds can track the same index and still hand you different returns. Cost shows up in three places, and only one of them is printed on the fact sheet.
Expense ratio
The headline annual fee, accrued daily out of net asset value. You never see a bill — it simply comes out of the price. On a core index sleeve the gap between 0.03% and 0.20% is trivial in year one and material over a decade of compounding.
Tracking difference
The gap between what the fund returned and what its index returned. Fees explain part of it; securities lending, cash drag, dividend timing and sampling explain the rest. Two funds on the same index can diverge by more than their fee gap.
Liquidity
Screen volume is only the surface. A fund is as liquid as the basket underneath it, so a thin-looking ETF on deep large caps can absorb far more size than a busy one on illiquid credit. Watch the spread and the premium to NAV, not just the tape.
Annual fee on a $25,000 position
Illustrative — cost only, no return assumed| Fund type | Expense ratio | Cost per year | Cost over 10 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broad market index fund | 0.03% | $7.50 | $75.00 |
| Sector sleeve | 0.09% | $22.50 | $225.00 |
| Income or credit fund | 0.35% | $87.50 | $875.00 |
| Active thematic fund | 0.75% | $187.50 | $1,875.00 |
Straight-line arithmetic on a static balance, shown to size the fee gap only. The fee tiers are typical rather than quoted from any specific fund, and the table ignores compounding, tracking difference, spreads and taxes. It is not a forecast of any fund's performance.
Want the mechanics in longer form? The library has full entries on position sizing, maximum drawdown and value at risk — each one cross-linked to the indicators that use them.
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