The Mutual Fund Hall of Shame

By Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine

The universe of 8,000 funds has $11.5 trillion of your money and a lot of talent. But it also has its share of misguided strategies, incompetence and greed.

How about a real-estate fund that barely turns a buck during one of the longest property booms in U.S. history? Or a "market neutral" fund that swings one way -- down? Or an ace newsletter publisher whose funds don't show the same knack for timely stock picking?

We're not impressed. In fact, we're appalled. So welcome to the ceremony inducting new members into Kiplinger's Mutual Fund Hall of Shame.

Just being a lousy fund manager doesn't qualify you for the hall. And we respect fund firms that fess up to a mess and clean it up. Calvert Group relieved the managers of the Calvert New Vision Small Cap (CNVAX) fund in March after their style of frequent trading and momentum-chasing flopped. Calvert then enlisted John Montgomery, the boss of the reliable Bridgeway funds, to marry his computer stock-picking formula to Calvert's social screens.

Since the change, Calvert New Vision is 1 percentage point ahead of its benchmark, the Russell 2000 Index ($IUX) of small-company stocks. The fund lagged the index by an amazing 30 percentage points during the 21 months the previous managers were in charge.

But other losers fail to acknowledge their shortcomings. After an astounding 291% gain in 1999, the Van Wagoner Emerging Growth (VWEGX) fund has had one passable year amid a run of epic disasters. Garrett Van Wagoner also settled fraud charges in 2004 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Yet his fund shop marches on, with Emerging Growth shrunk to $22 million, from $1.5 billion, and with a 10-year annualized loss of 7%.

Van Wagoner's Web site talks about searching for well-priced growth companies but not the fund's inability to actually find them. That typifies the story of shameful funds. Now, on to eight others you shouldn't put your money in.

Missed the boom

On page 44 of its 2007 annual report, directors of Franklin Real Estate Securities (FREEX) note that the fund placed in the bottom 20% of real-estate funds for one, three, five and 10 years. Nonetheless, "the Board found such performance to be acceptable," they said. That speaks volumes about the ineffectiveness of fund directors. But just as disturbing is that this terrible fund exists inside a fund company that runs many fine income-oriented funds.

Alex Peters, a 15-year Franklin veteran with a good record as a co-manager in utilities and telecommunications, needs to regain his touch now that he's had some time to learn real estate. Starting at the real-estate fund in 2003, he did OK for a while until he mistakenly reasoned that commercial real estate would hit the skids and housing would suffer only a brief slump.

So in 2006 he beefed up home builders to more than 20% of the fund, a decision that resulted in the fund plunging from the bottom 20% to the bottom 10% of real-estate funds for every marking period from three months to 10 years.

"Some good past performance dried up," Peters says.

He punted the home builders in mid-2007, but the fund went on to finish the year with a 28%loss, twice as deep as the average real-estate fund.

Forever out of step

Henry Van der Eb is a permabear. He entered the investment business during the savage 1973-74 bear market, and he's still waiting for "the big one" -- the crash to end all crashes. Not surprisingly, Gamco Mathers (MATRX), which he's run for 33 years, has been out of step for more than three decades.

Over time, stocks go up more than they go down, but this handicap doesn't absolve Van der Eb of blown opportunities. In 2002, an awful year for stocks, Mathers still lost 12%. Prudent Bear (BEARX), another actively managed sky-is-falling fund, gained 63% that year.

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In 2006, Van der Eb accurately predicted the housing slump, but he failed to short home-building stocks -- that is, to sell borrowed shares in hopes of buying them back later for less money. Van der Eb says he held back because he feared that if the stocks rose suddenly, panicked short-sellers would rush to buy, and "I could be down 20% while out to lunch." Van der Eb also likes gold, but he dislikes gold-mining stocks and can't use gold futures or exchange-traded funds because the fund can't own commodities.

These compromises explain why Mathers has just broken even over the past 10 years despite bear-fund opportunities such as the tech bust, company scandals, Sept. 11 and record gold prices.

Ham-fisted picks

It's understandable that a technology fund would blow up when tech stocks crumble, as happened in 2000-02. But to resume losses long after the crash is another matter. John Hancock Technology (NTTFX), born ages ago as National Aviation and Technology, had been a continual loser from 2004 until last spring, trailing its revived peers by 8 to 10 percentage points a year while charging high expenses. It ranks near the bottom among all tech funds for the past three years.

The fund's biggest current holdings, including Cisco Systems (CSCO, news, msgs), Google (GOOG, news, msgs) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, news, msgs), are respectable but don't tell the full story. The failure is in the small and midsize companies that make up the heart of the fund. Several of these stocks became worthless after the fund made seven-figure investments, and others are way down because of earnings disappointments.

Hancock won't discuss the fund with Kiplinger. The ham-fisted stock selection went on so long that the company is abandoning human management of the fund in favor of a mostly computer-generated approach. The new operators declined to explain their formulas, so until the computers prove that they pick stocks better than the people who preceded them, watch this fund from a distance.

Gold turns to stone

Midas is a gold-oriented shop, so you might expect Midas Special (MISEX, news, msgs) to be a bearish fund like Mathers. That would partly explain its dismal record. But, no, Special is Midas' place to "discover opportunities" in any stock category, and at that it's a failure. The 10-year annualized return -- or lack thereof, in this instance -- is -0.7%, or 7 percentage points per year less than that of Standard & Poor's 500 Index ($INX). It ranks just above rock-bottom among all actively managed stock funds.

For a change, manager Bassett Winmill is having a decent run. The fund's returns last year ran well ahead of the S&P 500's, with 40%of Special's assets nowinvested in Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, news, msgs), Hilton Hotels (HLT, news, msgs), Google and Leucadia National (LUK, news, msgs).

Continued: 22 years of futility

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