Check out this Mutual Fund for last 35 years - amazing!

^GSPC

Yes, truly amazing performance against the S&P 500.

A perfect example why after 10 years time less than 2 percent of money managers will beat the index.

Guys like Fama, French, Malkiel, and Bogle won Nobel Prizes (real ones not Obama/Gore ones) by showing the best you can do in investing is to be the average.

Ok then wrote:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=PENNX&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=&c=

^GSPC

Yes, truly amazing performance against the S&P 500.

....brutal....

malmo wrote:

Guys like Fama, French, Malkiel, and Bogle won Nobel Prizes (real ones not Obama/Gore ones) by showing the best you can do in investing is to be the average.

Of course, neither Eugene Fama, Kenneth French, Burton Malkiel, nor John Bogle has ever won a Nobel Prize.

There are many financial economists who believe Fama and French will eventually win it, but it has not been awarded to them yet. They do have the most widely cited academic research paper in finance over the last 20 years however.

malmo wrote:

A perfect example why after 10 years time less than 2 percent of money managers will beat the index.

Guys like Fama, French, Malkiel, and Bogle won Nobel Prizes (real ones not Obama/Gore ones) by showing the best you can do in investing is to be the average.

Even simple markets are NP-hard. It's mathematically ignorant to think the stock market is efficient.

Ok then wrote:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=PENNX&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=&c=

^GSPC

Yes, truly amazing performance against the S&P 500.

The charts on Yahoo! Finance do not include dividend reinvestment or capital gains distributions, which will be significant in any fund with that historical track record or length of performance history. Of course, the S&P 500 index also does not include dividend reinvestment either, but the mutual fund distributions will normally be much, much greater than the dividend yield of the index. Thus, you cannot conclude anything from this chart.

Finance Guy wrote:

malmo wrote:

Guys like Fama, French, Malkiel, and Bogle won Nobel Prizes (real ones not Obama/Gore ones) by showing the best you can do in investing is to be the average.

Of course, neither Eugene Fama, Kenneth French, Burton Malkiel, nor John Bogle has ever won a Nobel Prize.

There are many financial economists who believe Fama and French will eventually win it, but it has not been awarded to them yet. They do have the most widely cited academic research paper in finance over the last 20 years however.

You beat me to it. The closest to a Nobel Prize for "showing the best you can do in investing is to be the average" was perhaps the Nobel Prize awarded to Markowitz, Miller, and Sharpe for their work on the capital asset pricing model. So whatever one thinks about the Nobel Prizes to Obama and Gore, they were a lot more "real" than the ones "won" by Fama, French, Malkiel, and Bogle.

Finance Guy wrote:

Ok then wrote:http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=PENNX&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=&c=

^GSPC

Yes, truly amazing performance against the S&P 500.

The charts on Yahoo! Finance do not include dividend reinvestment or capital gains distributions, which will be significant in any fund with that historical track record or length of performance history. Of course, the S&P 500 index also does not include dividend reinvestment either, but the mutual fund distributions will normally be much, much greater than the dividend yield of the index. Thus, you cannot conclude anything from this chart.

You beat me to it on this point as well. Pennsylvania Mutual Fund has actually done very well against the relevant indexes over the long term when distributions and dividends are properly included in the performance calculations.

Ah got me there. Although I was sure that Fama and Maliel were Nobel prize winners, their non-winner status is a hell of a lot more valid than Gores or Obamas prizes.

I have done pretty well myself. Tripled my account in about 4 months. Here's some charts of some stocks I bought in July:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=LEX.V&t=6m&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MAI.TO&t=6m&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AXU&t=6m&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=RBY&t=6m&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=

I post here occasionally, usually warning people about the massive inflation and ultimate currency crisis on our horizon. I don't think a single person on letsrun really got my message, and if they agreed somewhat, they never acted on it.

Those stocks above are gold/silver Jr. mining stocks, some that trade on the Canadian exchanges. I have several others, many with similar charts as above. Every time Bernake opens his trap and talks about buying up worthless securities with printed up money, my account goes into hyper drive. Looking forward to more quantitative easing....Bernake talk for printing money. Maybe Obama can come out with some more deficit spending. Really looking forward to that!

Good luck with your investments.

Split adjusted price from 1989 is ~$1. So returns 10.8%/pa. Decent. SPX 6.6%/pa. So some serious alpha there.

A 10 bagger in 21yrs. Worth considering....

With no investment education whatsoever I have at least double the return of this. So who are you trying to impress?

Finance Guy wrote:

The charts on Yahoo! Finance do not include dividend reinvestment or capital gains distributions, which will be significant in any fund with that historical track record or length of performance history. Of course, the S&P 500 index also does not include dividend reinvestment either, but the mutual fund distributions will normally be much, much greater than the dividend yield of the index. Thus, you cannot conclude anything from this chart.

What can you conclude about the part where it says the yield for this fund is 0.07%?

Ok then wrote:

What can you conclude about the part where it says the yield for this fund is 0.07%?

One can only conclude what this metric is designed to measure. The "yield" refers to CURRENT "dividend yield." So given the low 0.07% yield, this implies the fund mostly invests in companies that are not currently paying dividends or at least very low dividends. Checking the profile of the fund confirms that its investment style is small-cap growth, which is definitely the type of companies most unlikely to pay a dividend. The investment style of this fund could easily have changed many times over the last 35 years, so this yield tells us little about previous dividend payouts or long-term performance.

[quote]Paula Struthers wrote:

it is a common name but the returns since mid-70s amazing

Almost every year it did great

I do own this.

If it did great every year, it is a ponzi scheme.

Finance Guy wrote:

One can only conclude what this metric is designed to measure. The "yield" refers to CURRENT "dividend yield." So given the low 0.07% yield, this implies the fund mostly invests in companies that are not currently paying dividends or at least very low dividends. Checking the profile of the fund confirms that its investment style is small-cap growth, which is definitely the type of companies most unlikely to pay a dividend.

Absolutely. That's why I questioned your assertion the chart showing poor relative performance against the S&P 500 was meaningless.

The investment style of this fund could easily have changed many times over the last 35 years, so this yield tells us little about previous dividend payouts or long-term performance.

Is it a common occurrence for a large-cap fund paying decent dividends to change its style to one focused on small cap growth stocks?

I added up all the annual returns and divided by years and it averaged a return of 18.90 per cent last 35 years. At that rate, you double your money every 3.5 years. That is indeed impressive.

I challenge you to find another mutual fund that has returned 18.90 per cent annually over last 35 years

Here's the deal with this fund: It is a small cap growth fund, not a standard US big cap fund. This means a couple of things:

1) Small cap stocks have done far far better than the SP 500 for 10+ years, so

2) comparing it to the SP 500 is not fair to the SP 500 - apples to oranges

3) there are plenty of other small cap funds that have done better than this one over 10 years.

For example, the best small cap fund I can find over the last 10 years is the Bridgeway Ultra-Small Company BRUSX, which has returned 14.5% over 10 years and 15.9% per year over the past 15 years, vs 10.6% and 11.0% for the fund in question.

For individual investors, the key point to learn from this thread is that everyone should have some small cap stock exposure in their portfolio because small caps have done quite well over the past 10 years while big caps have stagnated.

The small cap index is up around 8% per year over the last 10 years, while the SP 500 is up just 1% over the past 10 years.

The catch is that over the next 10 years, maybe big cap stocks will do better than small ones, so don't focus all your firepower on just one asset class)