It has been awhile since we could say this, but Small Cap stocks actually out-performed large caps yesterday (and is outperforming nicely today), as IWM (iShares Russell 2000, Expense Ratio 0.24%) has caught a relative bid even amid global equity distress.
IWM itself has pulled in >$2.2 billion in recent sessions, which is not a number to sneeze at (about 10% of AUM) and the ETF was up an impressive 1% or so yesterday on a huge intraday reversal on giant volume.
IWM had a $4 handle intraday range in fact, bottoming at $103.54 before ultimately closing significantly higher and touching $107 at one point. Year to date, IWM and the Russell 2000 Index have still greatly lagged the S&P 500 and relevant tracking ETFs, but in the past five days, IWM is down less than half what the S&P 500 is, so it is clear that value buyers have surfaced to some degree here.
Of course, everything Russell 2000 tied should be monitored closely here for accelerated activity and volume, although flows in leveraged long UWM (ProShares Ultra Russell 2000, Expense Ratio 0.95%) have been flattish as of late.
IWM and UWM of course are often in heavy play on first of the month model manager tactical portfolio trading too in many months, so perhaps we will continue to see heavy activity in these in early November if not over the next several weeks as well.
Likewise, there are two much smaller strategies that also track the Russell 2000 that are worth watching, one from Vanguard, VTWO (Vanguard Russell 2000, Expense Ratio 0.23%) and TWOK (SPDR Russell 2000, Expense Ratio 0.12%). VTWO was listed in late 2010 as Vanguard’s answer to IWM, but the fund remains rather small comparatively with $344 million in AUM.