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One of the most persistent investment trends is the migration of money out of stock mutual funds and into exchange-traded funds, which are easier to trade, have lower operating expenses and often have favorable tax treatment.

Over the last 10 years, a net $900 billion has flowed out of stock mutual funds and $1.8 trillion has flowed into stock E.T.F.s, according to Morningstar.

Eager to give the public what it wants, and to keep shareholders from walking out the door with their assets, some fund providers have begun to convert stock mutual funds into E.T.F.s. Others run E.T.F. versions of their popular mutual funds, and one company, Vanguard, allows tax-free direct swaps of mutual fund positions into equivalent E.T.F.s.

E.T.F.s are simpler and cheaper for managers to run than mutual funds. Investors benefit when the savings and convenience are passed on to them, and from other inherent advantages that drove the rise in E.T.F.s in the first place.

“There are real benefits to having more E.T.F.s, especially in larger, more liquid funds,” said Christopher Cordaro, chief investment officer of RegentAtlantic, a Morristown, N.J., financial-planning firm. “If I’ve got two versions of something and the E.T.F. has a lower-cost portfolio, it’s an easy decision to use the E.T.F. over the mutual fund.”

The decision to test the conversion concept was not all that easy for Guinness Atkinson Asset Management, which was the first fund provider to do it, said Todd Rosenbluth, director of E.T.F. and mutual fund research at CFRA Research. Jim Atkinson, Guinness Atkinson’s chief executive, said the plan was studied for two years. It was carried out in late March when Guinness Atkinson Dividend Builder and Guinness Atkinson Asia Pacific Dividend Builder became E.T.F.s listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

“This is a trial balloon for other funds,” he said. “Operationally, we want it to go OK.”

If it does, the firm’s alternative energy fund is up next. Mr. Atkinson conceded that while “there may be funds that are better as open-end mutual funds, our intention is to convert all of our funds.”

Dimensional Fund Advisors is sending aloft a trial balloon of its own. It plans to convert six stock mutual funds into E.T.F.s, with the first four conversions set for June. The new structure will allow it to reduce its annual management fee to 0.23 percent from about 0.32 percent on average.

A third fund provider, Foothill Capital Management, filed last month for approval to convert its Cannabis Growth Fund, with about $7 million of assets, into an E.T.F.

E.T.F.s are cheaper to run in part because the management company can stay out of the way and let buyers and sellers deal with one another. Operating a mutual fund means handling new investments and redemptions every day and having cash on hand in case redemptions significantly exceed sales.

Another advantage often accruing to E.T.F. shareholders is favorable tax treatment. Mutual funds generally have to distribute capital gains each year, whereas an E.T.F., like a stock, incurs tax liability only when the owner sells at a profit.

Converting a mutual fund to an E.T.F. is legally a merger of the old fund with the new, Mr. Atkinson said, and is thus not a taxable event.

Vanguard is using a different technique to let investors in 47 of its index mutual funds, 36 that own stocks and the others bonds, move their assets into E.T.F.s free of tax consequences. Each E.T.F. was created as a share class of the equivalent mutual fund, which the law regards as a nontaxable transfer.

Vanguard has no plans to convert any mutual funds, said Rich Powers, its head of E.T.F. and index product management, nor does the company expect to create E.T.F. share classes for any actively managed mutual funds.

Other fund providers run E.T.F. versions of their large index-based mutual funds, but Vanguard has a patent on the technique of tax-free transfers between share classes. Mr. Powers said there were discussions with other fund providers about licensing it, but none have taken the plunge, perhaps because the patent expires in two years and other companies may be waiting until then to offer such transfers.

Whichever companies follow in the footsteps of Guinness Atkinson and Dimensional in making conversions are not expected to be industry giants. Indeed, several of the largest fund providers — BlackRock, Vanguard, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity — said they had no intention to convert their mutual funds.

There are two reasons that conversions are more appealing to smaller firms. Mr. Cordaro noted that mutual funds can be bought and sold free of charge on platforms run by brokerages. The brokerages need large, popular fund providers — the BlackRocks of the world — to attract investors, but smaller managers need the platforms more than the platforms need them, so they often have to pay to be on them. E.T.F. managers face no such demand.

The other impediment for large managers is a feature of E.T.F.s that they might view as a bug, at least when it comes to actively managed portfolios: the requirement that most E.T.F.s disclose their holdings daily.

Disclosure is seldom a problem for smaller funds, which usually complete portfolio trades the same day. Mr. Atkinson said that is the case with the two funds that have been converted. But large funds may need several days to execute significant portfolio changes to avoid moving the market. If an E.T.F. discloses that it has begun buying or selling a particular stock, traders may jump in and do the same to try to take advantage of anticipated price movements.

Another issue that Mr. Powers cited to explain why Vanguard does not offer actively managed E.T.F.s, and would not be inclined to convert actively managed mutual funds, is that there is no way to restrict investment in an E.T.F. If a mutual fund in a frothy market segment attracts too much money, making managing the portfolio unwieldy, the manager can limit new investment, but that isn’t allowed with an E.T.F.

E.T.F. conversions may be limited to smaller funds, but Mr. Cordaro would worry about trying one with anything too small.

“There’s an ongoing downside to smaller, more thinly traded E.T.F.s when you have turmoil in the markets,” he said. “During big down days, when there’s a lot of dislocation or volatility, there can be a big discount” to a fund’s net asset value, “or a big impact on the bid-ask spread,” the difference between the price at which buyers buy and the slightly lower price at which sellers sell.

Whatever size portfolio might be the object of a conversion, Mr. Rosenbluth anticipates more of them after the first have had any kinks resolved and have been shown to be successful.

“We’re likely to see more of these once these pioneering strategies make the effort and we see that investors don’t revolt, and stay within the fund,” he said.

A potential limit on conversions is that “some investors are still comfortable with mutual funds,” Mr. Rosenbluth added. “What I hear from asset managers is they want to give investors choice.”

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Small-cap value stocks rank among the market’s riskiest fare.

But higher risk can bring bigger rewards, and in the first quarter, it did for three of the better-performing mutual funds. Each returned more than 20 percent by betting on small-cap value.

Value investors are betting on stocks that they think are trading below their fundamental worth. Often, companies end up classified this way because they operate in out-of-favor industries or have had setbacks.

Here are some of the choices that enabled three funds to prosper.

Kinetics Small-Cap Opportunities

The Kinetics Small-Cap Opportunities Fund toted up a first quarter return that would have been whopping for an entire year — 60.5 percent. In contrast, the S&P 500 index gave a total return of 6.2 percent for the quarter.

Peter Doyle, one of the fund’s co-managers, said his fund achieved its result thanks to an unusual holding: the Texas Pacific Land Corporation.

Texas Pacific grew out of the bankruptcy of the Texas Pacific Railroad in the 1800s. It owns land and water rights in Texas’s Permian Basin, one of the United States’ leading oil-and-gas-producing locales. The company earns royalties from others’ drilling on its land, and its stock shot up in the first quarter, returning nearly 120 percent.

Until this year, some mutual funds wouldn’t hold Texas Pacific because it was a publicly traded trust, not a corporation. It converted its legal structure in January, though Kinetics has owned it since 2002.

Texas Pacific recently accounted for 43.9 percent of the fund’s assets. It was one of 36 holdings.

Kinetics’s enormous bet is “an outgrowth of our long time horizon and low turnover strategy,” Mr. Doyle said. “Maybe five of our names will be great investments. If you don’t turn over frequently, those five will become a bigger and bigger percentage of the portfolio.”

Mr. Doyle said patience is essential to how he and his co-managers run their fund. He said they view it as an advantage in a business characterized by shorter-term thinking.

Fund managers’ bonuses are often based on annual returns, so they focus on those, he said. “If you can get away from that, you can buy great companies at a discount.”

But a concentrated approach, like Kinetics’s, can increase risk because it reduces diversification.

By at least one measure, the fund is riskier than its peers: Morningstar says the standard deviation of its returns — a measure of their ups and downs — is 35.7 percent, compared with 25.5 for its average peer. A higher number signals more risk.

The fund’s no-load shares have a net expense ratio of 1.65 percent and returned an annual average of 26.4 percent for the five years that ended March 31, compared to 16.3 percent a year for the S&P 500.

He said that’s an outgrowth of his approach, which focuses on companies’ ability to produce free cash flow — that is, cash left over after a company funds its operations and maintains its assets. (Small-cap energy businesses can be speculative and require substantial investment before producing free cash.)

To spot cash spigots, Mr. Kammann ranks the 900 stocks in his investment universe and digs deeper into the better-ranking ones to understand why they’re cheap.

“One of the risks I assume, quite intentionally, is I’m selecting stocks where the market is fearful,” he said. Otherwise, the shares wouldn’t be bargains.

Value hunters are betting that the market is wrong and that their stocks are sturdy enough to outperform lagging industries or bounce back from difficulties.

“The key is that investors have a tendency to overextrapolate good news and bad news,” Mr. Kammann said. “That’s why value investing works.”

Lately, his stock picking has led him to a company helped along by the pandemic: Poly, formerly known as Plantronics, a maker of headsets and other communications equipment.

The company had seen a planned merger collapse and a competitor, Jabro, swipe market share. The stock sank in the early days of the pandemic.

Mr. Kammann sensed a buying opportunity. “We thought the stay-at-home environment would be positive for headsets and that, post-Covid, there was going to continue to be some form of hybrid work. So we redoubled the position.”

The Hartford fund, whose A shares have a net expense ratio of 1.3 percent, returned 23.8 percent in the first quarter.

American Century Small-Cap Value

Free cash flow is also a lodestar for Jeff John, lead portfolio manager of the American Century Small-Cap Value Fund.

It’s one of several measures he considers as he’s screening companies. Others include balance-sheet strength and quality of management.

“We generate a score for each company, and that lets us compare it to other companies in its sector and across the portfolio,” he said. “We want to use data to remove some of the inherent biases we all have.”

Like Mr. Kammann’s approach, Mr. John’s has led him away from such traditional value-centric industries as energy and utilities.

Instead, he has lately found promise in Compass Diversified, which he calls a mini-conglomerate.

Compass, a publicly traded partnership, owns such diverse companies as the Sterno Group, producer of the canned fuel, and 5.11, a maker of clothing and gear for law enforcement and for the outdoors.

Compass’s managers are “incredible allocators of capital,” Mr. John said. “They invest in these businesses and help them grow, and if there’s an opportunity to sell them, they’ll do that.”

In 2019, for example, Compass sold off Clean Earth, an environmental remediation company, and Manitoba Harvest, a producer of hemp foods .

Mr. John also likes Penske Automotive, calling it “one of our core holdings for quite some time.”

Penske is known for its network of car dealerships, but its business is burlier than that, he said. Commercial trucks, via sales and leasing, have recently powered the company’s growth.

“Within the commercial truck space, 70 percent of gross profit comes from the servicing,” he said. “A sale is really just an entree to providing service over time.”

The company’s chairman, Roger S. Penske, makes shareholder interests a priority because he’s a substantial one himself, Mr. John said. “Penske owns 40-percent-plus of the company.”

The American Century Fund, whose investor shares have an expense ratio of 1.25 percent, returned 24.7 percent in the first quarter.

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Crucial bridges are decaying. The electricity grid is straining. And climate change, as it worsens storms, floods and wildfires, is intensifying problems. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States a C– in its latest infrastructure report card.

Help may be coming. President Biden has proposed $2 trillion in new infrastructure spending. A compromise between the president and Senate Republicans would provide about half that, though congressional Democrats are pushing for more.

No matter what happens in Washington, infrastructure challenges will endure, and the need will grow. That may create opportunities for such infrastructure stocks as electric utilities, builders of roads and bridges, and owners of railroads and cellular towers. And the mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that specialize in owning those outfits could benefit.

“There are so many tailwinds right now,” said Josh Duitz, manager of the Aberdeen Global Infrastructure Fund. “Two big ones are renewables and 5G.”

Renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, is needed to meet global climate goals; more cell towers are required for the rollout of fifth-generation — 5G — wireless networks.

If the U.S. government chips in more money, that should only help, Mr. Duitz said.

Of course, an investment opportunity, no matter how tantalizing, doesn’t guarantee gains. The market can rise and fall on wishes and worries; unanticipated woe — be it a financial crisis or a pandemic — can sap it.

“Stocks may be in the infrastructure industry or they may own infrastructure assets,” said Josh Charlson, a director of manager selection at Morningstar. “But the securities themselves are still publicly traded equities and are usually going to share in the trends of the broader markets.”

Aside from the recession induced by the coronavirus pandemic, trends for the sector have been favorable for much of the last decade. Infrastructure stocks have trailed the S&P 500 but put up positive returns while providing higher dividends.

The U.S. dollar-hedged version of the S&P Global Infrastructure Index had an average annual total return of 7.9 percent for the decade that ended June 30, while the S&P 500 returned a 14.8 percent annual average.

But the pandemic, with its traffic-congestion reprieves and aircraft groundings, battered the infrastructure sector: The index slipped 8.2 percent in 2020, while the S&P 500, after a spring plunge, ended up delivering a total return of 18.4 percent. As of June 30, the infrastructure index was up 6.5 percent this year, while the S&P 500 was up 15.3 percent.

“Many infrastructure assets were disproportionately hurt” by the pandemic, said Jay L. Rosenberg, head of public real assets for Nuveen.

Mr. Rosenberg said auto traffic is bouncing back to prepandemic levels, but air travel might not recover for several years.

A growing number of funds invest in infrastructure stocks. Morningstar counts more than 30, up from fewer than 10 a little more than a decade ago.

They typically own shares of what Matt Landy, one of the portfolio managers of the Lazard Global Listed Infrastructure Portfolio, called “regulated monopolies providing essential services.”

“When you’re cooking dinner on a stove or sitting in your office using a computer or driving on a road, you’re using infrastructure,” he said. Pipelines providing natural gas, power lines transmitting electricity and roadways all count as infrastructure.

The 407 ETR, a turnpike skirting Toronto, for example, is operated by a Spanish public company named Ferrovial, a recent top holding of Mr. Landy’s fund.

Investors pondering a bet on infrastructure can opt for an actively managed fund, like the Lazard offering, or an indexed one, like the iShares Global Infrastructure E.T.F. or the SPDR S&P Global Infrastructure E.T.F.

Active funds offer the chance to beat the market or to match it with less jittery returns, while passive ones typically have lower expenses and track market indexes.

The retail shares of Mr. Landy’s fund, with an expense ratio of 1.23 percent, returned an annual average of 10.4 percent over the decade that ended in March. In contrast, the iShares E.T.F., with an expense ratio of 0.46 percent, returned an annual average of 5.5 percent over that period.

One allure of many infrastructure funds is income: In a world of measly interest rates, they often have healthy yields. The average infrastructure mutual fund tracked by Morningstar paid a 12-month yield of 1.7 percent on May 31, while the 10-year U.S. Treasury security was paying about 1.5 percent in early July.

Infrastructure investments are sometimes said to provide inflation protection — something salient with prices lately rising. Common forms of infrastructure income, like tolls and utility rates, often grow with inflation. “For a lot of these companies, their top line is tied to inflation, so they’re able to keep pricing in line with inflation,” said Pranay Kirpalani, manager of the Fidelity Infrastructure Fund.

Yet one analysis concluded that claims of inflation protection didn’t hold up.

Vanguard in 2018 studied the performance of infrastructure stocks over 28 years and found that they didn’t hedge inflation any better than the broader market or real estate investment trusts.

“If your primary objective is inflation protection, commodities might be a better option,” said Aidan Geysen, author of the report and a senior investment strategist at Vanguard.

A reputed benefit of infrastructure that did hold up was risk reduction. Mr. Geysen found that infrastructure stocks were less volatile than the overall market.

If you’re considering an infrastructure fund, be aware that infrastructure stocks and interest rates tend to move in opposite directions, he said. That may matter more in the months ahead: Rates will most likely rise if inflation endures.

“As rates fall, you can get a tailwind,” Mr. Geysen said. “But you wouldn’t expect that that tailwind would persist going forward. As rates normalize, they may well turn into a headwind.”

Another potential peril of an infrastructure bet is doubling down on risks you’ve already taken.

Infrastructure funds usually hold big slugs of utilities and industrial stocks. Those two sectors together account for nearly 80 percent of the S&P infrastructure index. You may already own plenty if you have a broadly diversified portfolio.

Perhaps the main risk of buying an infrastructure fund or E.T.F. is misunderstanding what you’re getting, said Barbara Weber, founding partner of B Capital Partners, an infrastructure investment consultancy in Zurich.

People often talk about infrastructure investing as if they could directly own a piece of a steady source of income like a toll road, she said. A more typical holding of a U.S.-focused fund or E.T.F. would be stock in a big public utility, like Duke Energy or the Southern Company, which run fossil fuel power plants and complex energy distribution networks.

“There you have full-blown market risk and operational risk. There’s nothing bad about that, but I wouldn’t call it safe,” she said. https://nohu.win/ Our user-friendly platform and mobile app make it easy to place bets, track your results, and manage your account on the go.

The markets and the economy continue to reap the benefits of the recovery from the pandemic and its associated recession.

For the most part, new cases of Covid-19 keep falling, and vaccinations, jobs and economic growth keep rising. For a long stretch, the stock market has been rising, too.

After sending stocks to elevated valuations by many measures, investors might wonder whether they have conjured an impossibly bright future in which economic and corporate results remain robust while inflation and the pandemic remain subdued.

Bears are alarmed by the ebullient mood, as you would expect, but some neutral and even bullish investors are uneasy, too. Support for stocks seems broad, but not deep.

“We’re at a 50-year high for equities as a percentage of financial assets, not counting home equity,” said Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist at Citi Research. “We’ve run too far this year. There’s limited upside and, relatively speaking, more significant downside.”

Sky-high sentiment has been “helped along by powerful monetary and fiscal stimulus,” he said. “That can’t be sustained for a long period of time.”

It was sustained long enough to send the S&P 500 up 8.2 percent in the second quarter. But while that brought the index to almost twice where it was at the low last year, Mr. Levkovich says stocks are not in a bubble.

He does worry, though, that “parts of the market are bubblicious,” such as initial public offerings, which are often at extravagant prices for companies with no profits, and special-purpose acquisition companies, often known as blank-check funds because investors give the managers freedom to buy whatever they like without prior approval.

A sign that some of the froth may already be coming out of the market is that the price of Renaissance I.P.O., an exchange-traded fund that invests in companies after their first week of trading and holds them until they have been on the market for about a year and a half, was recently about 15 percent below its high set in February.

There may not be a marketwide bubble, but Mr. Levkovich considers a 10 percent decline — known in Wall Street jargon as a correction — as “very plausible” this summer. He cites the convergence of four factors: an anticipated signal from the Federal Reserve that it will trim asset purchases; the emergence of profit margin pressures on businesses forced to raise wages; an expectation that inflation will persist; and an increase in corporate taxation.

Jeremy Grantham, long-term investment strategist at GMO, has been saying for months that markets of all sorts are in bubble territory.

Along with “flaky little stocks bid up by individuals getting checks” — a reference to companies like GameStop and A.M.C. whose stocks soared after attracting interest on social media — he highlighted sharp price increases in housing and commodities.

“It’s the first time in history that the U.S. is experimenting with bubbling all its markets at the same time,” Mr. Grantham said.

Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco, is more optimistic, but still cautious.

“Valuations are stretched when we look at metrics relative to history,” she said.

At the end of June, the stock market was valued at 205 percent of the country’s economic output, a high. Just before the market plunged in 2000, the figure was 143 percent.

“But one could argue that they are not at their highest ever because monetary policy is so accommodative,” she said. As long as the Federal Reserve maintains that loose money policy, she said, “it supports stocks.”

Support for them in the second quarter produced a 7 percent gain for the average domestic stock fund tracked by Morningstar. Portfolios that specialize in technology and communications did especially well, while those that invest in energy and defensive sectors like utilities lagged.

International stock funds were up 5.7 percent, with Latin America portfolios particularly strong.

For many investment advisers, the outlook for stocks hinges on the outlook for inflation, which has been rising. The personal consumption expenditure core price index, which is closely tracked by the Fed, rose 3.4 percent in the 12 months through May. That’s the steepest increase since 1991, but the reopening of the economy is a major extenuating circumstance that prompts some to dismiss inflation risk.

“There has been this debate on whether the Fed would lose control of inflation,” said Ron Temple, co-manager of Vanguard Windsor II. “The real debate is which side of 2 percent do we land on. Inflation of 2 to 2.5 percent is not life-changing.”

Ms. Hooper highlighted “a burst of spending in a lot of countries” as pandemic restrictions are eased, but she expects it to abate soon, with economic growth remaining strong. But while she agrees that inflation isn’t a danger, she doesn’t think there is no danger at all.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of correction this summer,” she said. And she pointed out that even if the pandemic has been ebbing in the United States, it is far from over.

“Very few people are focused on a resurgence of the pandemic,” Ms. Hooper said. “Whenever a risk is being largely ignored, it’s important to bring to light that it’s a real possibility.”

Mr. Grantham has not been ignoring that risk. He said it “has been worrying the hell out of me.” He put the odds of “another serious wave” at 4 out of 5. If it occurs, he said, it will provide the markets with “a sharp rap around the knuckles in terms of confidence.”

Laird Landmann, co-director of fixed income at TCW, an asset management firm based in Los Angeles, worries about the effects of expansive fiscal policy on financial markets.

“We have $3 trillion deficits,” he said. “If they were to stop them tomorrow, it would be like the Fed raising rates dramatically.” While much of the spending has bolstered the economy, he said, continuing to run such large deficits causes problems, too.

“We may have stomped on the accelerator fiscally a little too hard,” Mr. Landmann said. “It’s hard to break the habit of the federal government spending twice as much as it takes in.”

The prospect of rising inflation and unceasing prodigious spending in Washington did not mute demand for bonds or bond funds. Helped by a decline in the 10-year Treasury yield from 1.74 percent to 1.45 percent, the average bond mutual fund rose 1.8 percent in the second quarter, led by long-term government portfolios and specialists in emerging market and high-yield instruments.

With many investments so expensive that they already may account for all possible good news, some advisers are inclined to be picky, recommending individual securities or narrow market niches.

“A lot of the optimistic outlook is priced in,” Mr. Temple said. “I’m not here to tell you the market will be up X percent in the next year.” Returns will depend, he said, “less on a market call and more on a security selection call.”

Among the calls he is making with his portfolio is for continued strength in big technology companies, such as Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent of Google, for which he expects the earnings backdrop to remain favorable no matter what, and Bank of America, an exemplar of what he calls “responsible growth.” The bank has been able to expand profits at a healthy clip, even as it reduces risk in its lending, by cutting costs substantially.

Reducing risk is a good idea for bond investors, in Mr. Landmann’s view. TCW is shortening the average duration of its holdings and limiting corporate debt exposure. Corporate issues that he favors include companies like General Electric and Kraft Heinz.

Mr. Grantham finds few places to make or even keep money. He recommends emerging-market value stocks as a two-for-one special. Emerging markets are underpriced, historically, relative to American stocks, he said, and value stocks are especially cheap relative to growth stocks.

Ms. Hooper prefers economically sensitive stock market segments, including smaller companies, and European and emerging markets. She foresees a rebound in capital investment, bolstering corporate productivity, which should benefit technology industries, particularly cybersecurity, cloud computing and software services.

But if the pandemic surges again, she would recommend gold, high-quality bonds, cash and defensive corners of the stock market. Such an event is likely to create “significant headwinds for the economy,” she said, prompting investors to “flock to safe haven asset classes.”

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After a remarkably fruitful year in which the stock market shook off rising inflation and coronavirus cases, 2022 began with a decline. It may be the first in a series of ups and downs as Wall Street anticipates moves by the Federal Reserve and copes with the lingering pandemic.

It will be hard for investors to know what to do as the Delta variant gives way to Omicron and whatever variants evolve next. As for the Fed, the evolution of its policy is perplexing the markets, too. Recent statements and past behavior by its chair, Jerome Powell, suggest it will ramp up the effort to fight inflation, then change course if markets become unduly agitated.

“The markets have come to believe that if there’s a major correction in the equity market, Powell will help them out,” said Komal Sri-Kumar, president of Sri-Kumar Global Strategies. “The result is a seesaw motion in which the market corrects in anticipation of tightening, then the Fed eases and the market goes up.”

After the S&P 500 rose 10.6 percent in the fourth quarter, giving it a 26.9 percent gain for 2021, the index made a marginal new high as 2022 began, then lost ground.

One reason for the January decline is the release of minutes from the December Fed meeting, which showed growing discomfort about inflation and included discussion of accelerating the pace of interest rate increases. The minutes led some investment banks to forecast four rate increases this year instead of three and an earlier start to the process of selling the trillions of dollars of assets bought in the quantitative easing program.

But if inflation stays high after a period of tightening, Mr. Sri-Kumar said, the Fed will have to maintain that tighter policy, however sensitive the markets might be to it. Failure to do so could risk damaging the economy, he said, something the markets would be even more sensitive to.

Some investment advisers expect the Fed to become consistently hawkish. Bill Hester, senior research analyst at Hussman Strategic Advisors, said in a commentary on the firm’s website that Mr. Powell had made the case before the pandemic that forceful early action was required when inflation expectations threaten to get out of control.

The Fed may be closer to making that determination than many realize, Mr. Hester said. The unemployment rate, 3.9 percent according to December data reported this month, is lower than in 2015, at the start of a Fed tightening cycle during which the labor market continued to strengthen. Moreover, the labor force has been shrinking as fewer people are working or seeking work, which might encourage the Fed to think that full employment can be achieved with a higher unemployment rate.

There is also a benign possibility, which Rick Rieder, head of the global asset allocation team at BlackRock, adheres to, in which inflation ebbs on its own.

“Some tangible changes will kick in, in the second or third quarter,” he said. “Inventory levels are in really good shape” on many goods, “and we should see some alleviation of pressure on energy prices.” Also helping is that consumer price comparisons with a year earlier will be more favorable.

Simeon Hyman, global investment strategist at ProShares, an issuer of exchange-traded funds, is another inflation optimist. He expects Fed tightening to succeed, and he highlighted snippets of data, such as a recent steep drop in the Baltic Dry Index, which measures global shipping rates, to back his case. He anticipates inflation falling to 3 percent, “a number that stocks can digest,” and forecasts S&P 500 earnings to rise 10 percent to 15 percent this year, “enough for stocks to do OK.”

Stocks did better than OK last year. The average domestic stock fund tracked by Morningstar rose 6.6 percent in the fourth quarter and 21.9 percent on the year, although both results lagged the S&P 500 considerably.

A handful of giant technology stocks accounted for much of the market’s return, but tech funds performed only in line with broad stock portfolios. Many of the best sector funds focused on financial services and natural resources.

International stock funds had an ordinary year, rising 7.9 percent, including 1.9 percent in the fourth quarter. There were vast differences in results geographically, with specialists in Europe and India greatly outperforming and Latin America and China funds showing losses.

Much of how 2022 unfolds will depend on the coronavirus and the response to it. If evidence continues to pile up that Omicron is more transmissible than other variants, but milder, it could show the way out of the pandemic. That could be great for society but potentially harmful for investors by removing the virus as a deus ex machina that has helped to make market conditions ideal.

In response to the coronavirus, the Fed created trillions of dollars out of thin air, Congress doled out trillions more, and the pandemic provided a tacit guarantee that interest rates wouldn’t rise. If Omicron means a return to regular order, investors will have to contend with the highest inflation in a generation, record fiscal debt and a Fed lacking a reason not to tackle inflation forcefully. At the same time, stocks and bonds are very expensive, limiting prudent investment options.

“There’s no place to hide,” Melda Mergen, global head of equities at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, said during a presentation of the firm’s 2022 outlook. “Most of the markets are at the top of the bar in their current valuations.”

She remains bullish toward stocks but emphasizes pockets that are less expensive, such as smaller companies and value stocks. She noted, though, that the valuation gap between growth and value stocks has narrowed, so the pickings are slimmer.

Other investment advisers also recommend looking for less overpriced market segments, but they differ on where to find them. Mr. Sri-Kumar likes European stocks more than American ones, and he would buy emerging markets, such as India, that do not depend on strong growth in China, where he foresees growing risk in 2022.

Ian Mortimer, a co-manager of the Guinness Atkinson Global Innovators fund, suggests owning “quality defensives,” stocks in industries that feature rising dividends. Some examples are British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, which also sells tobacco, and the insurance company Aflac.

For Mr. Hyman, “the view for stocks is a lot better than the view for bonds.” He said the financial, energy and materials industries tend to do well when interest rates rise.

If stocks do better than bonds in 2022, it will mean more of the same for fund owners. The average bond fund was flat in the fourth quarter and up 1 percent for all of 2021. The standout niches, each returning about 5 percent on the year, held bank loans and high-yield bonds.

Mr. Rieder favors such diverse assets as carmakers’ shares, investment-grade corporate bonds, and stocks in Indonesia and Colombia, although he broadly prefers American markets to foreign ones. He predicts low-double-digit gains for the S&P 500.

But he tempers his optimism with concern that inflation might not abate and that the Fed has instilled “a sense of complacency in the markets.”

“That’s going to make their job a lot harder from here,” he said, adding, “If they waited too long and have to brake hard on the other side, it will cause the markets to go down hard.”

Judged by their name alone, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities would seem a cure for one of today’s main investor anxieties: inflation.

Alas, that name doesn’t tell all you need to know.

A mutual fund or exchange-traded fund that invests in TIPS can help prevent rising prices from eroding the value of your investment portfolio. And inflation is a worry today: It’s running at an annual rate of 7 percent, a level not seen since 1982. That’s when “E.T.” landed in movie theaters and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” thrummed on radios.

But TIPS funds and E.T.F.s aren’t the best inflation fighters for every investor, and TIPS, a kind of bond issued by the U.S. Treasury, have complexities that belie their plain-as-boiled-potatoes label.

People assume “just because inflation goes up, you’ll do well” with TIPS, said Lynn K. Opp, a financial adviser with Raymond James in Walnut Creek, Calif. But other factors, like rising interest rates, can sap TIPS’s returns, she said.

Plus, TIPS are expensive when compared with standard Treasuries in that they pay less interest, Ms. Opp said. In the first week of January, a five-year TIPS was yielding minus 1.7 percent, while a five-year Treasury was yielding 1.4 percent. In effect, TIPS investors were paying the Treasury to hold their money.

Negative yields notwithstanding, money lately has been rushing into TIPS funds and E.T.F.s.

In 2020, net new flows of about $22 billion gushed into them, according to Morningstar. In just the first 10 months of 2021, those flows nearly tripled, to $61 billion.

Performance may have been the draw: The average TIPS fund tracked by Morningstar returned 5.5 percent in 2021, compared with a loss of 1.5 percent for the Bloomberg Barclays Aggregate Bond Index, a well-known bond index.

To understand TIPS funds or E.T.F.s, it helps to understand the underlying inflation-protected securities.

The U.S. Treasury adjusts the principal of a TIPS twice a year based on the most recent reading of the Consumer Price Index, a government measure of inflation. When the C.P.I. climbs, the principal ratchets up. And when the index falls — because prices are falling — it ratchets down.

“The interest payments can change,” said Gargi Chaudhuri, head of iShares investment strategy, Americas, for BlackRock, because those payments are based on principal that can change with inflation.

The C.P.I. has lately outpaced expectations. But that situation hasn’t always prevailed.

“If you look back a decade, inflation expectations sat above where inflation rolled in year after year,” said Steve A. Rodosky, a co-manager of PIMCO’s Real Return Fund. “So people would’ve been better off owning nominal Treasuries.” (“Nominal” is professionals’ term for noninflation-protected bonds.)

Perhaps TIPS’s most confusing quality is the nature of their inflation protection.

It might seem that a TIPS fund would work like hiking pants that zip off into shorts: right for whatever (inflationary) conditions arise. But what sets TIPS apart is the protection they afford against unexpected inflation, said Roger Aliaga-Diaz, chief economist for Vanguard.

Market prices for all assets adjust, to some extent, to reflect anticipated inflation. Prices for standard bonds, for example, fall to compensate for the fact that inflation has purloined part of their original yields. Prices for TIPS fall, too, though the crucial difference is that their inflation adjustments help compensate for that. (Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.)

Whether you opt for a TIPS fund in your portfolio will probably turn on your age and expectations about inflation.

Retirees and people approaching retirement might choose one because its value should be less volatile than that of other assets that can help buffer inflation, like stocks and commodities, said Mr. Aliaga-Diaz. Vanguard’s Target Retirement 2015 Fund, a so-called target-date fund, allocates 16 percent of its asset value to TIPS.

Jennifer Ellison, a financial adviser in Redwood City, Calif., said her firm, Cerity Partners, currently recommends that clients keep 15 percent to 20 percent of the bond portion of their portfolios in TIPS funds. “But we have been as low as 10 percent at times,” she said.

A young person might not want any allocation to a TIPS fund, preferring stock funds as inflation insurance instead.

“Over the longer term, there’s been no better way to protect oneself from inflation than to have an allocation to stocks, because corporate earnings tend to grow at a rate that outpaces inflation, and stocks have appreciated at a rate that well outpaces inflation,” said Ben Johnson, director of global E.T.F. research for Morningstar.

Even for retirees, a less volatile sort of stock fund, like one that invests in dividend payers, might blunt inflation better than a TIPS fund, Mr. Johnson said.

“Among our favorites is the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation E.T.F.,” he said. “It owns stocks that have grown their dividends for at least 10 years running. That’s a way to dial down a bit of risk while maintaining some equity exposure.”

Another stock option is Fidelity’s Stocks for Inflation E.T.F., which holds shares of companies in industries that tend to outperform during inflationary times.

If you go for a TIPS fund, pick one with low costs, Mr. Johnson said. Costs always matter in investing, but they’re especially important here because all these funds, in the main, do the same thing: They buy a single sort of Treasury security.

“In the TIPS market itself, it’s exceedingly difficult to add value,” he said. Portfolio managers are thus often allowed to add in a slug of other sorts of bonds, as well as derivative securities. “But you do add risk by doing that.”

Among the cheaper TIPS offerings are the iShares 0-5 Year TIPS Bond E.T.F., the Vanguard Short-Term Inflation-Protected Securities E.T.F. and the Schwab U.S. TIPS E.T.F. All three have expense ratios of 0.05 percent or less.

Inflation expectations present a harder puzzle for investors than your expected retirement date. In theory, if you think inflation will exceed the market’s expectations, a TIPS fund would be a good bet.

Investment pros make this assessment by checking the break-even inflation rate — the difference between the yields on TIPS and nominal Treasuries.

“It’s the rate of inflation you need to average for TIPS to outperform nominal Treasuries over the period for which you’re investing,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at the Schwab Center for Financial Research. In the first week of January, that rate was about 3 percent for five-year Treasuries versus five-year TIPS.

People who think inflation will exceed that level for the next five years might want a TIPS fund. (They also might want to ask themselves why their inflation intuition is better than the market’s.)

Another vexation is how TIPS funds state their yields.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission mandates a standard formula for computing yields — the 30-day yield. That formula doesn’t work well for TIPS offerings because the regular principal adjustments to the underlying securities can distort its result.

Some fund companies calculate the 30-day yield including the principal adjustments; some don’t.

State Street Global Advisors, which sponsors the SPDR Portfolio TIPS E.T.F., is one that doesn’t.

“In our view, it’s more conservative to not include the inflation adjustment,” said Matthew Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas research for State Street. “Including it can lead to a misleading statistic — it’s likely to overstate the eventual yield of the fund.”

Perhaps the crucial fact to know about TIPS funds is the most basic one: They’re bond offerings, buffeted by the same macrofactors that buffet other bonds.

“If interest rates go up, the price is going to go down, pretty much irrespective of what happens to inflation,” said Ms. Jones of the Schwab Center.

She cautioned, too, that “there’s no guaranteed way to beat inflation.” https://tx88.com/ is committed to providing a safe and responsible gambling environment, with 24/7 customer support to assist you with any queries.

A TIPS fund might help. So might an appropriate stock fund. “Having some allocation to things like real-estate investment trusts and precious metals makes sense, too, but that’s not necessarily going to beat inflation, either,” she said.

One of the pitches for socially conscious stock funds has been that their performance won’t differ that much from the stock market’s. In theory, that lets you invest according to your values while approximating the market’s return.

This year’s stock market swoon has shown that to be painfully true — and then some. Socially responsible stock funds haven’t just fallen in step with the S&P 500. They’ve sunk a bit more.

The stock funds tracked by Morningstar dropped about 26.4 percent this year through Sept. 30, while the S&P 500 was down about 23.9 percent.

The offerings are better known as environmental, social and governance, or E.S.G., funds. That name stems from the fact that their managers, in making investment decisions, weigh environmental, social and corporate governance factors alongside financial ones.

Whatever you call them, something these stock offerings share with many large-capitalization stock funds and exchange-traded funds is that they often own a lot of technology companies.

Tech stocks account for about one-quarter of the assets of the average large-cap E.S.G. fund, compared with only one-fifth of the assets of the average traditional large-cap fund, according to Morningstar. And technology has been one of the sorriest stock-market sectors this year, down 31.4 percent through the end of the third quarter.

Many of the funds favor what investment professionals call growth stocks, which include technology names. This year’s market has battered growth stocks, while their antitheses, value stocks, have fared better.

“There are probably a lot of E.S.G. investors who didn’t know they were overweight growth,” said Jennifer Ellison, a financial adviser with Cerity Partners who is based in San Francisco. “But they’re waking up now and asking, ‘Why is my E.S.G. fund underperforming?’ We’re having a lot of those discussions with clients.”

What’s the difference between growth and value stocks, and why does it matter to E.S.G investing?

You could say growth stocks are favored by seers — people who years ago imagined that Google’s ability to vacuum up data from online searches could yield more than just a better search engine. (Google’s parent company is now called Alphabet.) Value stocks are favored by bargain hunters — people who today may envision General Electric not as an aging industrial conglomerate but as a sturdy collection of assets trading at a discount.

Sometimes — as was the case for much of the last decade — the stock market favors growth stocks. Other times — like this year — it favors value stocks. The S&P 500 Growth Index fell 30.4 percent through Sept. 30, while the S&P 500 Value Index dropped 16.6 percent.

In theory, investors with diversified portfolios should own both growth- and value-oriented funds — or a single fund with roughly balanced allocations of growth and value stocks.

An example of an actively managed socially conscious, or sustainable, fund with such a portfolio is the Vanguard Global E.S.G. Select Stock Fund. It has an expense ratio of 0.56 percent and has returned an annual average of 7.7 percent since its 2019 inception, though it is down 23 percent for the year through the third quarter. It owns a mix of U.S. and foreign stocks, and tech stocks account for only about 15 percent of its holdings.

The recent woes of many socially responsible stock funds and E.T.F.s raise the question why they have tilted toward growth stocks.

Part of the reason is that early E.S.G. clients tended to be driven mainly by their values, said Michelle Dunstan, chief responsibility officer for AllianceBernstein.

Funds catered to those clients by excluding environmentally damaging businesses, like nuclear power producers, and holding the best-of-the-best E.S.G. performers, she said. That led them toward growth ones like technology and consumer discretionary stocks.

Ms. Dunstan said sustainable strategies are now seeking out companies trying to improve their E.S.G. performance. She said AllianceBernstein, in its research, hasn’t been able to connect good E.S.G. ratings with stocks outperforming their peers.

“But we have made a link with improvement in E.S.G. ratings and outperformance. These companies aren’t just improving their E.S.G. ratings — they’re trying to become better companies overall.”

E.S.G. ratings from data providers like MSCI and Morningstar Sustainalytics can also influence stocks’ inclusion in sustainable funds, said Jon Hale, head of sustainability research for Morningstar. These ratings address risks like companies’ greenhouse gas emissions or workplace safety violations.

“Generally speaking, if you took the entire universe of stocks and evaluated them based on E.S.G. metrics, growth stocks would score higher than value stocks,” he said.

Many of the funds also bar companies that own fossil fuel reserves or depend heavily on fossil fuels in their operations. That knocks out not only much of the energy companies but also some manufacturers and utilities, other common value plays. Energy has been by far the best-performing sector this year, returning nearly 35 percent through Sept. 30.

“If you exclude hydrocarbons or heavy industry, you’re going to tend to skew more growthy,” said Aaron S. Dunn, co-manager of the Calvert Focused Value Fund. Mr. Dunn’s fund, an E.S.G. offering, owns two energy companies — NextEra and Constellation Energy — among its 30 holdings. The fund started earlier this year.

Only a few other sustainable value funds and E.T.F.s exist.

The biggest actively managed offering in the niche is the Parnassus Endeavor Fund, headed by Billy Hwan. Over the five years that ended Sept. 30, the fund, with a net expense ratio of 0.88 percent, returned an annual average of 9 percent; it lost 24.2 percent this year through Sept. 30.

Its largest holding is Merck, a pharmaceutical company that Mr. Hwan said he bought when its future looked uncertain. “They had an overreliance on one drug” — a cancer treatment called Keytruda — “but were investing hugely in R.&D.,” he said. “New management came in and diversified their revenues. A year and a half later, it’s one of our better performers.”

Among the indexed options for sustainable value investing are the Nuveen E.S.G. Large-Cap Value E.T.F. and the Calvert U.S. Large-Cap Value Responsible Index Fund.

Jordan Farris, head of E.T.F. product for Nuveen, said his company’s E.T.F. aims to give investors risk and return similar to a typical value fund but with sustainability considerations factored in. The E.T.F.’s holdings — it has about 100 — have “higher E.S.G. scores and low carbon-emissions intensity,” he said.

“Investors often assume E.S.G. funds are low carbon, but that’s not necessarily the case,” he said. “We remove companies that own coal, oil or natural gas that’s still in the ground. This makes our product align with investors’ perceptions of what E.S.G. means.”

The fund, with an expense ratio of 0.25 percent, has returned an annual average of 5 percent over the last five years.

Why does a nonprofessional need to care about subtleties like growth versus value stocks and how much a fund holds of each?

Some socially conscious funds, like Vanguard’s E.S.G. offering, save you from that worry. These are often referred to as core or blend funds.

The Northern U.S. Quality E.S.G. Fund is similar in its investments. Its managers pair E.S.G. evaluations with assessments of financial quality and end up with a blended portfolio intended to be less risky than the typical sustainable stock fund.

“There are many stocks that rank highly from an E.S.G. perspective that don’t necessarily rank highly from a financial perspective,” said Michael Hunstad, chief investment officer for global equities at Northern Trust.

“You really need to control the unintended risk of E.S.G. investing,” he said. “If you’re naïve, you’ll be underexposed to energy and utilities and underweight the U.S., and that’s a lot of extraneous risk.”

The Northern Trust fund’s sector allocations look much like those of its non-E.S.G. benchmark, the Russell 1000. Since the fund’s inception in October 2017, it has outperformed the benchmark, returning an annual average of 9.5 percent versus the index’s 8.9 percent. It lost 24.6 percent this year through Sept. 30. The fund has a net expense ratio of 0.49 percent.

The reason to aim for a balance of growth and value stocks, whether in one fund or across your portfolio, isn’t just to achieve a finance professor’s vision of an ideal asset allocation.

A portfolio with more balanced risks is one that an investor is more likely to stick with in turbulent times, like the current market, said Wendy Cromwell, head of sustainable investment for Wellington Management.

The trouble with owning sustainable funds — or any funds — that load up on growth stocks is you’ll be tempted to bail out when growth stocks sink, she said. (The same would be true if you owned value-oriented funds when value sagged.) Research shows that retail investors trade too often and buy and sell at the wrong time.

“It can be really hard for retail investors to hold the line when the opposite style is outperforming,” she said. “But the trick is to stick with your long-term plan. You want to invest in funds that help you overcome your own bad tendencies.” Join du88 today and discover a world of exclusive promotions, bonuses, and VIP rewards designed to enhance your betting journey.

Forecasting the direction of the volatile energy markets has never been easy. But experts say the complexity of market forces brewing now, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, makes it especially difficult to predict the direction of both energy prices and the industry.

“I’ve never seen such a spicy bouillabaisse of ingredients that could wreak havoc on energy prices,” said Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis at Oil Price Information Service. “You have to look and say that the world changed on Feb. 24,” the day of the Russian invasion.

A variety of forces could sustain high energy prices, including the recent production cuts by the producer group OPEC Plus, the winding down of an American-led program to release oil from the strategic reserves of the United States and other countries, subsidies by several European nations to help citizens pay higher energy costs and slow industry investment in drilling operations. On the other hand, prices could fall on fears of a global recession, the potential for energy rationing in Europe this winter and an effort by the Group of 7 industrialized nations to impose a price cap on Russian oil.

Brent crude, the closely watched benchmark for global oil prices, fell almost 25 percent during the third quarter, finishing September trading around $85 a barrel, although it has since moved higher as OPEC Plus announced significant cuts. The U.S. government forecasts that oil will trade at an average price of $95 a barrel in 2023.

Funds that invest in American energy companies, which typically mimic price movements in the oil markets, rose exponentially along with oil prices in the first quarter of this year. By contrast, those funds fell by an average of less than 1 percent in the three months that ended in September. Energy is the only stock sector fund category that posted gains, on average, in the first nine months of this year, according to Morningstar Direct.

Experts say the Group of 7 agreement on Sept. 2 to cap the price of Russian oil is generating much of the uncertainty about oil prices. The plan aims to limit Russia’s export revenues while keeping its oil flowing through global markets. Skeptics, though, say ‌a price cap may be difficult to enforce. Oil embargoes are notoriously leaky‌‌, and shippers can use legal measures ‌like ship-to-ship transfers at sea to try to obscure the origins of a cargo.

Goldman Sachs issued a research report the same day as the price cap agreement was announced, calling it “bearish in theory, bullish in practice” for oil prices and predicting that Russia, which pumps about 10 percent of the 100 million barrels of oil produced globally each day, might retaliate by cutting its exports to drive up global energy costs. That, the report said, “would turn this into an additional bullish shock for the oil market.”

That day, the Russian-owned energy giant Gazprom announced that it would postpone restarting natural gas flows from Russia to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Later in September, gas leaks were discovered in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines under the Baltic Sea. The European Union and several European governments blamed sabotage for the damage.

But Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management, who has been studying the impact of Russia’s war on the energy industry through the Chief Executive Leadership Institute that he founded at the school, recently wrote an opinion piece expressing his confidence in the Group of 7 plan. In an interview, he pointed to the small number of major shippers and insurers, mostly based in Europe, saying that should make enforcement easy because “you can count on both hands the number of parties you would need to enforce it with.”

He also cast doubt on the idea that Russia would switch off its oil spigots as readily as it had stopped sending natural gas to Europe. Russia has more options to sell its oil, and shutting down wells could create future problems for the Russian industry, Professor Sonnenfeld said, so President Vladimir V. Putin “would be poisoning the Russian economy for years.”

Philip K. Verleger, an energy economist who began his career as a Washington policy adviser 50 years ago, said that the production cuts announced by OPEC Plus are likely to have less of an impact now because the circumstances are quite different. The United States was more dependent on foreign oil in the 1970s, he said, so OPEC’s aggressive moves led to gas rationing and lines at filling stations. But the United States is a bigger producer today, and some drivers are choosing vehicles that use little to no gas.

“Electric vehicles are beginning to penetrate the market so rapidly that if OPEC pushes too hard now, they could really accelerate the move off oil,” Mr. Verleger said.

In past economic cycles, higher energy prices have reduced demand, ultimately putting a lid on prices. European governments are providing a test case by spending billions of dollars on price controls and direct stimulus payments to offset higher energy costs while encouraging their citizens to voluntarily turn down the thermostats. President Emmanuel Macron of France has called such voluntary conservation efforts “energy sobriety.”

But Europe is also investing heavily in new infrastructure to support imports of liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., which is supercooled so it can be shipped on tankers. They’ve been signing a flurry of deals to construct the facilities required to reconvert L.N.G. to vaporous gas in Germany, France, Belgium and elsewhere. American exporters may be among the biggest beneficiaries of this trend. The United States began exporting L.N.G. six years ago and became the world’s largest exporter in the first half of this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Paul M. DeSisto, executive vice president of the wealth management firm M&R Capital Management, says that whatever direction energy prices take, he sees the big energy companies in the S&P 500 index returning to something closer to their 20-year average of 8.3 percent of the market value of the index. At the end of September, energy stocks represented 4.5 percent of the S&P 500. “Given how important energy is to the world economy, I think it will return to something closer to the longer view,” he said.

His firm uses two energy-focused exchange-traded funds in client portfolios: the $35 billion Energy Select Sector SPDR, managed by State Street Global Advisors, and the $7 billion Vanguard Energy fund. The two funds have a slight difference in composition as they track different market indexes. The State Street fund owns the 21 energy stocks in the S&P 500 index, while the Vanguard fund includes a mix of more than 100 large, midsize and small U.S. energy companies. But the returns after the 0.1 percent management fee charged by both funds tend to be similar because Exxon Mobil and Chevron are the two biggest holdings in each fund, representing more than a third of the total assets. The State Street fund returned 33.76 percent in the first three quarters of the year, while the Vanguard fund returned 34.71 percent.

Despite the substantial geopolitical risks, commodity prices may ultimately be most influenced by the rate at which companies choose to invest profits in their own operations. So far, companies have been focused on returning profits to shareholders through dividends.

The Biden administration is keen to see more investment in the energy industry. “Ultimately our goal here in the United States and around the world has got to be to increase the supply of energy,” Wally Adeyemo, U.S. deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a recent energy conference at Columbia University. He pointed out that the president has taken steps in this direction by releasing petroleum from the country’s strategic reserves, but also by calling on the private sector to increase production. “We want to make sure that supply chains are stronger in the United States, but also among our friends and allies.” At vicclub, we offer a wide range of betting options, competitive odds, and secure transactions for a seamless gaming experience.

But the industry may still be reluctant to risk lowering prices too quickly. Mr. Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service said he thought the industry had learned its lesson from past boom and bust cycles and wouldn’t dramatically ramp up drilling. “They’ve gotten the message,” he said. “The companies are not going to kill the golden goose.”