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The Daily Dow LEXINGTON, Ky. (Apr. 18): Today was one of those days when the Blue Chips sat idly by while the technology-laden Nasdaq threw a bash. Not a bit of important news crossed the wires today about the Foolish Four, and none of them really moved much except for Kodak, which bucked the moderate downtrend for today and gained over $1 a share.
Since it's a non-event kind of day for the Dow, this gives me a chance to bring up a point I made yesterday in a Fribble called "BTD vs. Funds: The Saga Continues." (If you want to read the Fribble, click that smiling Fool on the Motley Fool main page and click into the Fribbles area. You can either search for Fribbles chronologically or by topic once you're there.)
This weekend I was doing some mutual fund research on my wife's fund. She has a 403-b retirement account, so she's limited to mutual funds. Academia hasn't left the Wise world yet ... big surprise there.
So my goal was to find a fund that might beat Beating the Dow, the plan we'd probably use for her plan if she were able to invest for stocks. And much to my dismay and disappointment, I had set myself an all-but-impossible task. Using Morningstar's 5-year returns as my screen, I kept coming up with nothing.
Tired of searching through the fund families she can choose from, I decided to make it easy. I listed the top 25 funds overall for 5-year returns. When I looked at the best of the best, it quickly became clear why I couldn't find what I was after. Out of the thousands of funds Morningstar ranks, only ONE mutual fund managed to Beat the four-stock BTD approach over the last five years, and that was by a slimmer-than-slim three-tenths of a percentage point. Ugh!
Yep, BTD is boring. Yep it's "too easy to be possible." Yep, it's about as exciting as watching your dryer spin. But in the face of that kind of performance from the mutual fund industry, it simply ain't Foolish to complain about it. BTD ... BTD ... BTD ... BTD!
Oh yeah ... the name of the fund that was on top? It's in the Fribble; check it out.
Transmitted: 4/18/96 5:53 PM
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THE FOOLISH FOUR (4/18/96) |
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