Investment Focus of Funds

2006 Investment Checklist
By Shannon Zimmerman
Advisor, Motley Fool Champion Funds

1. Focus on fees
The typical fund investor is paying an expense ratio of roughly 1.4% for a dog that underperforms such market trackers as Vanguard 500 Index (FUND: VFINX) and the exchange-traded fund known as SPDRs (AMEX: SPY). These worthy index picks will cost you just 0.18% and 0.11%, respectively. Fidelity, meanwhile, has lowered the price tags of some its most popular benchmark trackers to a measly 0.10%.As an investing cheapskate, I love those rock-bottom expense ratios, but make no mistake: As the guy who runs point on the Fool's Champion Funds newsletter service, I'm a big fan of actively managed funds, too. On my beat, though, I'm on the lookout for funds that outperform the market while charging shareholders far less than the typical fund does. Indeed, on average, our Champs will ding you less than 1% each year despite beating the market over the last three- and five-year periods by more than six and 10 percentage points, respectively.
Not too shabby, right?

2. Management matters
Don't be overly impressed by any mutual fund's five-star rating or Lipper Leader score, which are purely backward-looking, quantitative measures.Those metrics -- helpful though they may be -- are only meaningful to the extent that they help you understand how a fund has performed on its current manager's watch. For example, Fidelity Magellan (FUND: FMAGX) -- a fund that recently counted the likes of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), and Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) among its holdings -- is a veritable celebrity among mutual funds. Yet it owes that status to a track record largely assembled during previous managers' tours of duty. (That group, by the way, includes investment luminary Peter Lynch, who ran the fund between 1977 and 1990.) Indeed, after several years of underperforming the S&P despite an R-Squared score of 98, Fidelity recently opted to install Harry Lange -- one of the Boston-based behemoth's very best money managers -- as the skipper of the now-closed Magellan fund. 
(Not sure what an R-Squared score is? Not to worry: It's a staple of what's called Modern Portfolio Theory, and it simply expresses in numerical form how much of a fund's performance can be explained by movements in a given benchmark.)  

3. It pays to be picky
The hypothesis we use at Champion Funds is a simple one: If you apply the same level of rigor and analysis that stock jocks use when trying to pick the right stock, you can also choose the right fund -- and outperform the market while taking on less risk. We're doing just that over at Champion Funds right now. All of our model portfolios -- three baskets of funds designed with Aggressive, Moderate, and Conservative investors in mind -- are beating their benchmarks. All told, our complete list of recommendations is beating the market by more than seven percentage points. And while I don't want to belabor the point (OK, maybe I do), that showing comes amid far fewer stomach-churning performance gyrations than a stocks-only portfolio would likely provide.