I Have To Be Missing Something

Barron's had a piece that ranked the top mutual fund managers with some help from Value Line. The ranking is risk adjusted relative to other funds with similar objectives.

The winning fund was the Third Millennium Russia Fund (TMRFX). I have written a couple of times about this fund and every time I look at the fund it is lagging, what I believe would have to be, its benchmark by a mile.

Barron's has returns in its table for YTD, 1 year, 3 years and 5 years.

This chart compares the fund with the RTS Index, which is the major benchmark in Russia, YTD.








This chart is for one year.











And finally the three year chart.

If the benchmark is, you know something logical, like the Russian Stock Market I think it is reasonable to wonder what is going on here.

Sometimes the chart can miss the dividend paid out by showing it as a drop in price.

YTD there has not been any payout from the fund to offset any of the lag on that chart.

Year end 2004 the fund paid out $5.66 in gains. That amount was 14% of the price of the fund. For the period August 13, 2004-August 13, 2005 the index was up 50% and the fund shows up 30%. Add the 14% payout back in and the fund lagged by six percentage points.

For the last 12 months the index is up 105% and the fund is up 30%. The 2005 yearend pay out amounted to 6.6% of the price at the time it paid. This doesn't account for much of the lag at all.

I looked at a couple of other time periods and could not find a time (on BigCharts) where the fund even stayed close to the Russian market.

Either I am missing something entirely or maybe someone is confusing genius with being in a bull market.