Money, in brief

Morningstar's scorecard covers 9,226 US funds holding about $29 trillion, roughly two thirds of the whole US fund market. [1]

It grades a fund on two questions, not one. Did the fund still exist at the end? And did it beat a cheap index fund - a fund with no manager picking, that just holds everything on a list? [1]

Over the ten years to June 2026, 25% of funds run by a manager managed both. [1]

Among the big US company funds it was 13%. The Wall Street Journal reported the same figure off the same data. [7]

The hardest number sits in one corner of the market. Of the funds picking fast-growing big US companies twenty years ago, 66% closed, and fewer than 1% beat their average index rival. [1]

A fund that closes is not in next year's table. That is the whole problem, and it has a name: survivorship bias, the habit of reading a list that had its failures removed. [31]

Morningstar states the rule plainly. A dead fund flunks the first question, because it did not make it to the end. [2]

Watch what dying does to a record. Of 150 US high-yield bond funds alive at the end of 2004, 72 were still there twenty years later. The other 78 closed, after an average of 8.3 years. [2]

Thirty-two of those 78 were ahead of the index on the day they died. But the ones that were ahead lived 2,844 months between them. The ones that were behind lived 4,518. [2]

Funds close for a dull reason. Morningstar puts an exchange-traded fund's fixed running costs at about $250,000 a year, so it needs roughly $33 million in it to break even. [3]

In 2025, 146 funds run by managers and traded on an exchange closed. 114 were wound up and 32 were folded into other funds. It was a record, and so was the roughly 1,000 that launched. [3]

Most of the ones that closed held under $25 million and had been running about 1.75 years. Only six held more than $50 million. [4]

Why it matters. Morningstar expects more closures: 462 of these funds are both under $50 million and already past the year and a half a manager usually allows. [4]

In 2025 alone, 3,140 funds run by managers were measured. 38% both survived the year and beat their index rival. Over the ten years to the end of 2025, it was about one in five. [47]

Why it matters. A single year flatters or punishes almost at random, which is why the ten-year count is the one that matters.

Morningstar studied 464 funds in five unusual categories that do not follow the main stock and bond markets. Over ten years, 184 of them were wound up or folded into another fund. [48]

Why it matters. Two in five gone, in a group a saver would have picked for safety through variety.

The data firm HFR counted 129 hedge funds wound up in the first quarter of 2026. That is up from 45 the quarter before, and the most since the middle of 2024. In the same three months, 166 new hedge funds opened. [9]

Why it matters. The same shape as the fund tables above: the count published afterwards has the 129 taken out of it.

Hendrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University tracked 29,081 US stocks across a hundred years. 52% lost money and 59% did worse than plain cash. The average stock gained 30,621% in total. The middle one lost 6.9%. [10]

Why it matters. An average carried by a handful of huge winners is not what a typical holding did.

A 2009 paper said a measure called active share - how far a fund strays from the list it is judged against - predicted which funds would win. AQR re-tested it in 2016 and found no predictive power. A BlackRock test on later data found it pointed the wrong way. [11][33]

Why it matters. A rule found in old data has to survive new data before it means anything.

Researchers rebuilt a study that used machine learning to choose funds. The advantage vanished. Yearly returns fell by 1.37 to 1.42 percentage points, and none of it held up. The team also found survivorship bias in the original work. [12]

Why it matters. The same defect turned up inside a method built to remove human judgement.

Morningstar counted more than 1,000 new exchange-traded funds of every kind in 2025, beating 2024's record of 750. It called the practice a spaghetti cannon: fire enough at the wall and a couple stay up. 276 of the new funds tracked a single company's shares. [5]

Why it matters. It names the business reason the tables lose their failures - the failures were expected all along.

The CRSP mutual fund database keeps funds that no longer trade. That way a study of fund returns is not accidentally a study of the ones that lasted. [6]

Why it matters. Somebody had to build a separate product to undo the deletion, which is a fair measure of how much it distorts.

Managers hand their numbers to databases voluntarily, and often only once the numbers look good. Investopedia calls that backfill bias, and says survivorship makes the same published figures better-looking again. [8]

Why it matters. Two edits to one record, both pushing the same way.

A study of matched pairs of companies found that firms added to the S&P 500 do significantly worse over the long run. That is after the short price jump index funds cause when they buy in. The authors call it a pattern, not a proven cause. [13]

Why it matters. The index's own record is made of arrivals and departures a reader never sees. [32]

Morningstar put the average dollar in US funds at 8.7% a year over the ten years to the end of 2025, against the funds' own 9.9%. The difference comes from when people bought and sold, and adds up to about $3.8 trillion. [14]

Why it matters. Even a surviving fund's published return is not what the people in it actually got.

SAVE ended on 1 July 2026. [37] Under a settlement, the US Education Department agreed to move the roughly 7 million borrowers still in it onto other plans. It had allowed payments as low as $0 for the lowest earners. [15][16]

Why it matters. It was the cheapest plan for people earning least, and it no longer exists.

The Repayment Assistance Plan charges between 1% and 10% of income for 30 years, with a $10 floor. [17] A new Tiered Standard plan sets the length by the size of the debt: 10 years under $25,000, rising to 25 years above $100,000. [18][35]

Why it matters. A longer term means a smaller payment each month and more interest paid overall.

More than half a million graduate students took a Grad PLUS loan in 2024-25, and new students no longer can. [19] A lifetime cap of $257,500 now covers most other federal loans. [18][36]

Why it matters. Medical and law students borrowed the largest sums under it.

The administration is rewriting the rules for public service loan forgiveness, which would shut some public workers out of relief they were counting on. [38] Borrowers describe the wider overhaul as confusing and unfinished. [39][34]

Why it matters. People chose those jobs partly on the old rules.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued an interpretive rule saying federal law overrides the 15 state laws that keep medical debt off credit reports. It is not legally binding, so courts will settle it. As of 2024, 36% of US households had medical debt. [20]

Why it matters. It changes nothing this week and could change a great deal later.

All 99 of the state's hospitals agreed to stop collecting certain debts dating back to 2014. They also agreed to discount care automatically for a family of four earning under $96,000, with no application. [21]

Why it matters. It was done by agreement between a state and its hospitals, not by a law.

Bills to shield patients from medical debt were defeated this year in Indiana, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota and Wyoming, against opposition from the industry. [22] The consumer bureau's own guidance says an unpaid medical bill only reaches a credit report once it is over $500 and more than 365 days late. [41][40]

Why it matters. Protection now depends mostly on which state you happen to fall ill in.

From 15 July 2026 the Financial Conduct Authority regulates buy now, pay later credit in the UK. The market grew from £60m in 2017 to more than £13bn in 2024, and use rose from 14% to 25% of adults in a single year. [23]

Why it matters. It was the largest form of everyday borrowing sitting outside the normal credit rules.

The Federal Reserve surveyed nearly 13,000 people and found 16% used buy now, pay later in 2025. Most lenders do not report the loans, so paying on time earns no credit and no lender can see what a borrower already owes. 26% of users had paid late at least once. [24]

Why it matters. A debt invisible to every lender is also invisible to the next one deciding what you can afford.

A Federal Reserve research note in June 2026 mapped what these lenders now sell: alongside the free four-payment split, there are longer loans that do charge interest. [43] The consumer bureau's own study covered six large firms and tracked late fees and unpaid loans from 2019 to 2023. [42]

Why it matters. Two different products share one friendly name, and only one of them is free.

The average US savings account paid 0.38% in August 2026. [25][44] The best widely available accounts paid between 4.2% and 4.5%. [26]

Why it matters. The gap is about eleven times, and it is not a reward for skill - it is a reward for having moved the money.

Lists of the highest savings rates are led by accounts that pay their headline number on a thin slice only. One credit union pays 5.25% on the first $500, then less above it. A children's account pays up to 7% on balances up to $1,500. [27]

Why it matters. The rate at the top of the page is real, and almost none of your money can earn it.

From 2026, workers aged 50 and over whose Social Security wages topped $150,000 the previous year must make catch-up contributions after tax, not before. [28] The 401(k) limit rises to $24,500 and the individual retirement account limit to $7,500. [29]

Why it matters. The same money is saved either way; the tax simply moves from later to now.

Brookings researchers compared an exchange-traded fund with an otherwise identical mutual fund. In their worked example the two ended about 25% apart, $61,000 against $49,000. The reason is a tax rule that lets one swap shares instead of selling them, and the benefit lands mostly on higher-income households. [30]

Why it matters. Two funds holding the same shares, and the wrapper decides the tax bill.

US list prices fell 4% in the last quarter of 2025, to an average of $412,800, as rates eased and more homes came up for sale. [45] The typical first-time buyer is now 40 years old. [45][46]

Why it matters. Most of the improvement is the ordinary winter slowdown, not a change in what people can afford.