Generally, stock funds launch following long runs up in stocks, when the appetite for stock investing is high. In particular, these launches tend to occur in the hottest of the already hot market. That's why so many Japanese, Asian, and emerging market funds launched in the early 1990s (to kick off the U.S. and other fully emerged stock  market decade with emerging markets lagging), small cap funds a few years after that (right before larger cap led the market), larger cap growth and tech funds in the late 1990s (before the 2000 crash), "dividend" and yield-focused funds around the mid 2000s (before high dividend banks collapsed), emerging market funds yet again in recent years, and commodity funds.

When bubbles mature, investors begin considering even more speculative areas with supposedly more upside, believing "all the money has been made" in the things that have already taken off. This second wave takes what was learned in the bubble, and applies it to an investment with questionable upside, often jolting the price even faster and higher than the original bubble.

With an almost perfectly flat S&P 500 in March, you’d almost think the month was a dull one on Wall Street. Hardly. By the middle of the month the S&P 500 was down about 8% from the close in February, largely due to a massive natural and manmade disaster in Japan (a market that itself was down almost 20% from the levels in February). Though Japan only partially rebounded, the S&P 500 ended the month back where it started.

Stocks continued to outshine bonds in February as inflation fears, state budget default hysteria, rising commodities, and growing inflation and turmoil in some emerging markets failed to spook investors (though in recent days things have become a little dodgy as oil prices hovered around $100).