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Commodities continued to top monthly returns for the major asset classes in March. The leadership marks the third straight month that raw materials outperformed the rest of the field by a wide margin, based on a set of proxy ETFs.
WisdomTree Enhanced Commodity Strategy Fund (GCC), a broad measure of raw materials, rose 7.5% last month. Year-to-date, GCC is up 21.3%, marking a large upside outlier performance so far this year for the major asset classes.
A strong second-place performance in March: US real estate investment trusts (REITs), which rebounded after a weak start to the year. Vanguard US Real Estate (VNQ) jumped 6.3%, the first monthly gain for the ETF in 2022.
US stocks also posted a solid gain in March via Vanguard Total US Stock Market (VTI), which climbed 3.3% for the month just ended.
Overall, most of the major asset classes lost ground — again — last month. The biggest loser: foreign government bonds in developed markets. SPDR Bloomberg Barclays International Treasury Bond ETF (BWX) tumbled 4.2% in March.
The Global Market Index (GMI) rebounded in March. This unmanaged benchmark (maintained by CapitalSpectator.com), which holds all the major asset classes (except cash) in market-value weights, rose 1.1% — the first monthly gain this year.
Reviewing GMI’s performance relative to US stocks and bonds over the past year continues to reflect a solid middling performance for this multi-asset-class benchmark (blue line in chart below). US stocks (VTI) earned a bit more than 10% for the trailing one-year window. By contrast, a broad measure of US bonds – Vanguard Total US Bond Market (BND) — fell 4.4%. GMI earned 3.3% for the year ended Mar. 31.
Editor’s Note: The summary bullets for this article were chosen by Seeking Alpha editors.
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