It has been a fine half year for stocks, money market funds and, to a lesser extent, bonds — so good, in comparison with last year, that you may feel like celebrating when you look at your quarterly portfolio statement.But this rosy picture doesn’t capture the entire situation for the mutual funds and exchange-traded funds used by most American investors.For one thing, while the recent market returns are real enough, the reports are missing critical information that would make the returns look less fabulous.A quirk in the calendar and in government disclosure rules always makes the fund numbers look considerably better when periods of poor performance move too far into the past to be included in the quarterly reports required for publicly traded funds. That happened this past quarter, when the miserable returns of 2022 were no longer fully represented in their stark awful …
