Eight years ago, the S&P 500 hit its Great Recession closing low, and since then, equities around the globe have been soaring. In fact, an S&P 500 investment on March 10th 2009 of $10,000 would have been worth over $40,000 today if you had been reinvesting dividends (according to data from Morningstar).

But what were the best performing funds in this time frame? High-flying biotechs? Microcap stocks with big growth potential? Actually, among the best performers were value-focused funds. In particular, the most value-centric products of all were the leaders.

Pure Value

Of the top ten unleveraged ETFs since the bull market began, three are actually ‘pure value’ funds from Guggenheim. Guggenheim’s entrants in this market include the MidCap 400 Pure Value ETF (RFV – Free Report) which was number seven on the list, and then the Small Cap 600 Pure Value ETF (RZV – Free Report) in the silver metal spot, and then the S&P 500 Pure Value ETF (RPV – Free Report) at number one overall. In fact, RZV and RPV have each turned a $10,000 investment into over $73,000 each since the start of the bull market run over the past eight years, crushing a ‘standard’ investment in SPY in the process.

As you can see in the chart of the top ten below, this focus on value would have also beaten the vast majority of ETFs in the market. This includes the entire world of semiconductor ETFs such as SOXX, or any REIT ETF such as VNQ as well, as these are both absent from the top ten, though they too have beaten the S&P 500 in the time frame.

And while mid-caps ‘lagged’ a bit relative to the absolute apex of the ETF world, the top performers of RPV and RZV did edge out the Internet ETFs from PowerShares (PNQI – Free Report) and First Trust (FDN – Free Report), and the biotech world with their top entrant of FBT too. So, how did this pure value concept manage to outperform against all odds, and over the rest of the value space as well?