Best and Worst Country ETFs Since Trump 2.0
If you missed Bespoke’s Paul Hickey on CNBC this morning, click here to watch the clip.
It has been 225 days since President Trump’s Inauguration on January 20th, and the S&P 500 (SPY) entered today up 8% since the last close before the Inauguration. That ranks 35th out of 45 country stock market ETFs we track closely. With a gain of 20.4%, the average country ETF shown in the table below is up much more than the US (SPY) since Trump 2.0 began. Greece (GREK), Vietnam (VNAM), and Spain (EWP) are up the most at 50%+, while Italy (EWI) has been the best performing G7 country at +35.2%. Speaking of the G7, the US has been the worst market among these seven developed nations since Inauguration Day in January.
In addition to post-Inauguration Day performance, we also show how each country ETF performed since global equity markets made their post-tariff crash lows on April 8th. The US (SPY) has posted much more respectable returns relative to the rest of the world; up 29.9% versus the average of 27.9%. Of the G7, only Italy (EWI) and Canada (EWC) are up more than the US (SPY) since April 8th, while France (EWQ) has lagged the most of this group with a gain of 19.5%.
Along with being the second-best-performing country ETF since Inauguration Day, Vietnam (VNAM) has easily been the best performer since April 8th with a gain of 77.5%. On the flip side, Saudi Arabia (KSA) is the only country ETF that is down over both periods (-10.9% since 1/20, -2.1% since 4/8). Argentina (ARGT) and Indonesia (EIDO) are two others that are now solidly red since 1/20, while India (INDA) is up just 1.6% since 1/20 and 5.7% since 4/8 (second worst).
Chart of the Day – 100 Days
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 9/2/25 – Back to Reality
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“I was never part of the crowd.” – Jimmy Connors
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
After four summer months when the S&P 500 gained at least 1.9%, September is starting on a characteristically weak note as futures are pointing to a decline of 0.7% to kick off the month. As detailed in this morning’s commentary, there’s nothing in the way of a major catalyst to speak of besides an uptick in treasury yields around the world. Gold and oil prices are also higher. The only economic reports on the calendar are the ISM Manufacturing for August and July Construction Spending. The ISM report is expected to come in below 50 again but show an uptick from last month’s weaker-than-expected reading of 48.0 to 48.9 this month. Construction spending is expected to show a modest uptick of 0.1% after declining 0.4% in June.
Historically, Labor Day week has been somewhat weak. Since 1945, the S&P 500’s median performance during Labor Day week has been a decline of 0.06% with gains just half of the time. Ironically, last year’s 4.25% decline was the weakest since 1946 and just the third time since 1945 that the index declined 4% or more during the week.
In terms of what that weakness means for the rest of the year, it doesn’t really mean anything. Last year, the S&P 500 rallied 4.13% through year-end after the 4.25% decline. In 2001, it rallied 1.28% for the rest of the year, and in 1946, it fell 8.11%. For all years since 1945, the S&P 500’s median performance from the end of Labor Day week through year-end has been a gain of 3.78% with gains 73% of the time.
One of the bigger individual stock stories this morning is the announcement that Kraft Heinz (KHC) will split itself into two companies in an effort to boost growth. As the graphic below shows, KHC and its peers could use all the help they can get. The snapshot below from our Trend Analyzer shows where KHC and its peer stocks are trading relative to their trading ranges. On a YTD basis, just two of the nine stocks listed are up on the year, and four of them are down by double-digit percentages. KHC isn’t quite down 10%, but it was before Friday’s news of the breakup originally broke. Last week was particularly poor for the group as well, with all nine trading down anywhere between 13% for Hormel (HRL) to a fractional decline for KHC.
If you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip the section below, which shows one-year price charts of the nine stocks listed above. Practically every single one of them has the same pattern – top left to bottom right. These are the types of charts you would expect to see during a bear market rather than after one of the strongest 100-day market rallies in history!
Brunch Reads – 8/31/25
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of some of our favorite articles over the past week. The links are mostly market-related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
Founding Felons: America’s first bank robbery unfolded in Philadelphia on the night of August 31, 1798, when thieves targeted the Bank of Pennsylvania inside Carpenters’ Hall. By morning, more than $160,000 in cash and notes had vanished, a fortune worth several million dollars today. At first, suspicion fell on the bank’s own directors, since there was no sign of forced entry. The locks themselves had been newly installed, and blame quickly and wrongly landed on the blacksmith who forged them, Patrick Lyon.
Lyon, who had fled the city during a yellow fever outbreak, was arrested upon his return and jailed for months. The truth eventually came out: Isaac Davis, a carpenter who had worked on the building, and Thomas Cunningham, the night watchman, had carried out the crime using stolen keys. Much of the money was later recovered, and Lyon was exonerated, though only after a humiliating ordeal that he later chronicled in a memoir.
Markets & Investing
There Are Now More ETFs in US Than There Are Individual Stocks (Bloomberg)
The number of ETFs in the US has exploded past 4,300, now outnumbering listed stocks for the first time and leaving investors overwhelmed by choice. Issuers are churning out new products at a record clip, often niche or risky strategies like single-stock and leveraged funds, while many near-duplicate strategies fizzle out. The glut has made it harder for individuals to navigate the market on their own, pushing more investors toward professional advice as they struggle to sort the few lasting funds from the many fleeting ones. [Link]
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The Bespoke Report – 8/29/25 – August For the Win
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August has recently been a month where negative surprises have a way of interrupting market rallies. This August that wasn’t the case, although it wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the market gods. Between the trade issues, the tail end of earnings season where reports tend to get weaker, higher inflation readings, the Fed’s Jackson Hole conference, or this week’s attempted firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, any of these events could have sparked a volatility fit, but the longer-term history of August calm prevailed, and markets skated through the month with broad based gains, with small-caps leading the way for once. Give it a read!
Daily Sector Snapshot — 8/29/25
US ETF Growth Easily Outpaces Market Gains Since 2020
With the recent news that there are now more ETFs than stocks in the US, we wanted to provide an update on the dollar amounts that have flowed into ETFs so far this decade.
Since the end of 2019, exchange-traded products (ETPs) in the U.S. — primarily ETFs — have exploded in size, outpacing even the impressive rise of the S&P 500.
The first chart below highlights just how powerful the trend has been: while the S&P 500’s total return has surged about +120% since the start of 2020, US ETF assets under management (AUM) have climbed an even steeper +177%. That gap shows that ETFs have not just grown alongside the market; they’ve attracted a massive wave of fresh capital from investors seeking low-cost, diversified, and flexible investment vehicles.
The second chart below underscores this growth in dollar terms. According to Bloomberg, U.S. ETF assets have ballooned from around $4 trillion at the start of 2020 to a record $12.3 trillion today. While markets have had their ups and downs over the past five years, the long-term trajectory of ETF adoption has been relentlessly upward. This expansion is being fueled not only by equity gains but also by the sheer volume of new inflows, as investors of all sizes, retail to institutional, continue to shift from mutual funds and other structures into ETFs. Put simply, ETFs are no longer a niche product…they are the market. With their assets now equal to more than half of U.S. GDP, their influence on trading flows, liquidity, and even market structure will only grow. And with ETF growth running far ahead of the broader equity market, this wave of adoption shows no sign of slowing down.
NVIDIA (NVDA) is How Big??
The largest company in the world — NVIDIA (NVDA) — reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday (8/27) after the close, and you can read our review of NVDA’s conference call here if you’re interested.
While NVIDIA (NVDA) has historically averaged a one-day change of nearly +/-8% following earnings, its reaction to this quarter’s report was a decline of less than 1%. As you can see in the chart below, bulls went into NVDA earnings hoping the stock would break out to new highs after a period of sideways action since mid-July. That breakout has yet to materialize, though, and today we’re seeing shares head lower by 2-3% again. For now, new highs for NVDA appear to be on hold.
Below are a few charts that highlight just how gigantic NVIDIA (NVDA) has become. The first stacks NVDA’s market cap against the world’s largest economies. At $4.4 trillion, NVIDIA is now bigger than the entire equity markets of five of the seven G7 countries—Italy, Germany, France, the U.K., and Canada. Japan is the only non-US country in the G7 with a larger market cap. That means one U.S. company, riding the AI wave, is worth more than the combined value of every publicly traded company in several of the world’s most advanced economies.
If you thought comparing NVIDIA to entire countries was wild, our next chart shows just how far ahead it is of some of America’s most iconic companies. With a market cap north of $4 trillion, NVIDIA is worth 6 Walmarts (WMT), 11 Costcos (COST), 20 McDonald’s (MCD), or 25 Citigroups (C). Taking it further, it could swallow 38 Nikes (NKE), 45 Starbucks (SBUX), or 50 Dells (DELL). At the extreme end, NVIDIA’s value equals about 60 UPS (UPS), 78 Chipotles (CMG), 94 Fords (F), 102 Targets (TGT), or 103 eBays (EBAY). Put simply, NVIDIA’s market cap isn’t just massive, it’s in a league of its own, making even household corporate giants look like small caps by comparison.
Our last chart pushes the point even further: NVIDIA’s market cap doesn’t just dwarf corporate icons, it makes many popular consumer brands look minuscule. At today’s size, NVIDIA is worth the same as 119 Hersheys (HSY), 183 Lululemons (LULU), or 244 Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS). It could equal 290 Domino’s (DPZ), 358 Wynn Resorts (WYNN), or 458 New York Times (NYT). Stretch it further, and you get jaw-dropping multiples: 551 Gaps (GAP), 984 Shake Shacks (SHAK), 1,223 Macy’s (M), 2,090 Under Armours (UAA), 3,036 Kohl’s (KSS), or an incredible 3,451 Cracker Barrels (CBRL). When one company is worth thousands of other recognizable brands outright, it underscores just how unprecedented NVIDIA’s dominance has become.
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 8/29/25 – The End is Near
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“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.” – Ingrid Bergman
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It’s all over. With Labor Day falling as early on the calendar as it possibly can, today marks the unofficial last trading day of Summer. Not surprisingly, futures are glum. The S&P 500 is indicated to open 0.3% lower, while Nasdaq futures are down by a more substantial 0.5%. The 10-year yield is trading modestly higher (less than 2bps), and the 4.22% yield is near the lowest level since April. Crude oil is fractionally lower, while natural gas is modestly higher. Gold is seeing modest losses, but cryptocurrencies are down by larger amounts, with Bitcoin down 2% and trading under $110K while Ethereum is down closer to 3% and trading below $4,350.
It may be the last summer Friday of the year, but the economic calendar is packed with data. Starting at 8:30, we’ll get Personal Income and Spending along with PCE and Wholesale Inventories. At 9:45, we’ll get the August Chicago PMI, which is expected to come in at 46.5, and that would be a modest downtick from July’s reading of 47.1. Finally, consumer sentiment from UMich will hit the tape at 10 AM. After a weaker-than-expected preliminary reading on 8/15, the headline reading is expected to remain unchanged at 58.6.
In Asia, the Nikkei was fractionally lower but finished the week higher. Japanese economic data was weak, with both Retail Sales and Industrial Production coming in significantly weaker than expected. While the weakness in those reports was disappointing, Tokyo CPI also came in lower than expected, which was positive. In China, shares of Alibaba (BABA) are higher following reports that the company is rolling out AI chips designed to fill the void left by the ban on Nvidia (NVDA) exports to the country.
Like the picture for US futures, European equities are also firmly lower as the STOXX 600 is trading down 0.5% taking its week-to-date decline to 2%. Country-specific equity benchmarks are also down across the board by similar amounts, although Spain is seeing outsized losses with a decline of over 1%. Banks are notably weak in the region following UK proposals to tax banks to pay down deficits.
Heading into this last trading day of the summer, the S&P 500 has been in rally mode, notching its 20th record closing high of the year, rallying over 2% since last Thursday, and trading well into short-term overbought territory.
One interesting aspect of the rally is that the new highs have come without the Technology sector making new highs in tow. The sector hasn’t exactly been lagging, but it hasn’t made a new high since August 13th.
If the rally is to continue in the short term, the market will also need to do it without seasonality working in its favor. As shown in the Seasonality tool on our website, the S&P 500’s median performance over the next week based on the last ten years of data has been a decline of 0.45% which ranks in the 15th percentile of all one-week readings throughout the year. The median one-month performance has been a decline of 1.94% which is among the worst one-month periods of the year! As bad as that is, the median three-month performance is positive at 2.8% which ranks in the 56th percentile of all rolling three-month periods. Historically, the last three months of the year have been positive, but we still have to get through September first!
The Closer – GDP, KISS, Auction Recaps – 8/28/25
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Looking for deeper insight into markets? In tonight’s Closer sent to Bespoke Institutional clients, we start out with a dive into today’s economic data including jobless claims and regional Fed manufacturing data (page 1). We continue on to the latest update of GDP (page 2). Next, we update our KISS basket (page 3) before closing out with an recap of this month’s Treasury auctions (page 4).
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