Second-quarter relief

In its overview of mutual fund performance in the second quarter, the New York Times quotes James Swanson of MFS. “A few months ago a lot of people thought the world was coming to an end. Now they’re dancing in the streets and going out to restaurants.”

This may be overstating things a bit. Elsewhere the article suggests that investors aren’t so much celebrating as sighing in relief. It’s a well known quirk of psychology that investors feel more pain from their losses than pleasure from their gains. And as of now, the most e-mailed article at the Times is about how long you should wait before taking your Social Security benefits—a calculation that many baby boomers must be wrestling with.

Still, though the future is always uncertain, it was good to see positive, even eye-popping returns, across the board:

The markets were so strong in the period that nearly every fund category — whether in stocks or bonds, or whether specializing in foreign, domestic, growth, value, small-cap, large-cap or various industry groups’ shares — showed a gain.... Among the highlights, foreign-stock funds rose 25.4 percent on average, with specialists in Asia and Latin America particularly strong. Real estate was the best of seven categories of funds focusing on single industries, gaining 29.8 percent. Financial, communications, technology and financial service funds had returns greater than 20 percent.