The market's been showing something interesting over the past four years: lower-quality small-cap stocks have consistently outperformed their higher-quality counterparts. You'd typically expect quality to win out in the long run, but that hasn't been the case with instruments tracking the Russell 2000 versus mid-cap indexes. This divergence raises questions about market efficiency and investor behavior. Whether this trend continues or eventually corrects is worth monitoring for anyone evaluating portfolio allocation across different cap segments.