Risk & return patterns
Three-year return plotted against five-year return for the 500 largest funds. Bubble size is assets under management.
Snapshot data captured from Yahoo Finance via yfinance, roughly 14 months old. Open any fund for live volatility and drawdown.
How to read this
The dashed diagonal marks funds whose three-year and five-year annualised returns are the same. A point sitting far above it earned most of its recent record in the last three years; the same fund looked considerably worse over five. That distinction is invisible in a ranked “top performers” list, which is exactly why sorting by a single trailing return is a poor way to choose a fund.
Leveraged and inverse products, and funds under $50M in assets, are excluded, their returns are extreme enough to compress everything else into an unreadable cluster.