When Jeffrey Vinik, the manager of Fidelity's flagship Magellan fund, pulled such a stunt in 1995, investors were predictably outraged.
Yet the abysmal performance of Magellan Fund in the interim is mute testimony to the impossibility of picking winners in advance.
FORBES: Playing With Active Money Managment Is A Losing Game
Peter Lynch, maestro of the Fidelity Magellan Fund in its heyday, famously said that you should invest in what you know.
Years ago, the Fidelity Magellan Fund was a mid-cap growth equity fund.
Like its namesake navigator, the Fidelity Magellan fund has seen its share of glory, though for the past several years the once mighty mutual fund has been a study in mediocrity.
Peter Lynch ran the Fidelity Magellan fund from 1977 to 1990 and had one of the best performance records in history for a mutual fund manager an annualized return of over 29% per year.
Lynch eventually took over as director of research for the small investment mutual fund company and in 1977 took over portfolio management of Fidelity's Magellan mutual fund.
Today you would have trouble distinguishing Magellan from an index fund so far as industry and group weightings are concerned.
Goldman Sachs owns a sliver of the company, and the mammoth Fidelity Magellan (FMAGX) fund owns 5% of the outstanding shares, while Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX) also has a respectable stake.
Jeff Viniks replacement at Magellan has got his fund fully invested, but the numbers through October still trail the market by more than 200 basis points and last year by 1, 100 basis points.
Magellan calls itself a growth fund and acts like an index fund.
The contrast between Magellan and Vanguard's Windsor Fund is night and day.
Stansky goes to great lengths in Magellan's semiannual report to defend his fund from this taint of closet indexing.
应用推荐