We rolled-out our interactive Total Return Chart Tool last year, as described in Introducing MFO Charts. Recently, we integrated several new features, including enhanced styling, eliminated display restriction (previously based on youngest fund), and added a legend placement option. Here’s a screenshot of 10-year total return performance of Artisan’s US equity funds, through November’s close, along with a comparison with S&P 500 ETF SPY:

All these Artisan funds have recovered strongly since their COVID lows, but some are well off their peaks at start of The Great Normalization cycle, which began January 2022, especially Artisan Small Cap Inv (ARTSX).

Over the past ten years it’s been hard to beat the S&P500 and our chart shows SPY is just few percent shy of its all-time high.

The features of our interactive Chart Tool include:

• Total return performance plots of up to 12 funds.
• Adjustable display period via Zoom buttons and Navigation Bar at bottom of chart.
• By default, Y-axis units are percentage growth relative to initial value of each fund for the plot period displayed.
• Scaling defaults to Relative and Linear, but it can be changed to Absolute and Logarithmic. Logarithmic scaling can be helpful because compound growth of constant value will appear as a straight line with its slope indicating the annualized return.
• New charts can be obtained quickly via the New button.
• Change location of legend or hide summary note below the chart via the View button.
• Click on fund name in legend to hide fund series.
• Hover cursor over plot to see performance values of each fund in series. Hover of fund name in legend to highlight its performance.
• Export and view chart data, print the chart, and download chart image in various formats.

We’ve created the YouTube channel @MFOPremium to host instructive videos on the features and use of all the tools on the site. Our first video is, aptly: Demo Total Return Chart Tool. Hopefully, these videos, in addition to our webinars, will help users fully explore the features embedded throughout the site.

Speaking of webinars, our year-in-review webinar is scheduled for Friday, 5 January. It will highlight performance of funds across different market segments and attempt to showcase various search features, including additions since our mid-year webinar. There will be just one session this year at 9 am Pacific (noon Eastern). Join us if you can in the New Year by registering here.

Lastly, my colleague Devesh Shah has advocated for months to bring fund flows to the premium site, which come via our Lipper Global Data Feed. But it’s a lot of data! The really hard part though is figuring out how to best integrate these data for ease of use and subscriber benefit. Fortunately, thanks again to our HighCharts license, we are close to bringing a new tool to the site called … Flows.

Below is a sneak preview of our evolving Flows tool, using one of my more painful memories, namely AlphaCentrics Income Fund (IOFIX), once considered the perfect fund … it went up, or stayed even, but rarely retracted … until one fateful day in March 2020.