Dateline: 11/25/97
Let me start this week's feature with a warm welcome to those who are discovering this site for the first time. I hope you find the information and analysis in my weekly missives useful, or at least interesting reading. Your comments and suggestions are most welcome!
The premier sites for mutual fund data used to be BellCharts and PALTrak. However, these are pay sites. No money, no data, though you can download their software for free with sample data to see how it works.
Last month the Globe & Mail changed all that. They introduced their GLOBEfund pages.
If you haven't tried it yet, do it! They are at http://www.globefund.com. GLOBEfund has the following features:
You should note that if you create a personalized fundlist with GLOBEfund, it is recorded on your own hard drive as a cookie. If your cookies are stored along with your Temporary Internet Files as mine are with Internet Explorer, you will lose the file if you periodically erase all your Temporary Files. Erase selectively!
For your convenience, I have three links to GLOBEfund in my Mutual Funds links page. One is to the site as a whole under the Megasites sub-category. The others are to Fund Selector under the Daily NAVPS sub-category and to Fund Filter under the Performance sub-category.
October 27, 1997, of course, was "Grey" Monday, as its now been dubbed. That's the day the Dow had its largest point drop in history. But on a percentage basis, the drop was only a third of the 1987 crash. (Which is why it is Grey Monday rather than Blacker Monday! Personally I thought it should have been called Blue Monday.)
This last week's Monthly Mutuals Reports in the Vancouver Sun and the Globe & Mail, then, are the first reports out since that day. They are also the first reports for which the ten year performance figures do not include the 1987 drop. As can be expected, the ten year performance levels for all funds jumped considerably.
Last month I started charting the funds performing better than 15% per year compounded over a ten year period. There were only three such funds, so my chart listed the Top Ten Performers for the period. This month, without the glitch of the 1987 crash, there are fully 20 mutual funds (See Chart) with a ten year performance surpassing 15% a year. Eight of them have performances better than 17%!
Looking now to my Power Performers, last month there were 17 Canadian, 18 American, three Dividend and one Resource fund in the list, 39 funds in total. (My Power Performers, you will recall, are those mutual funds who have demonstrated both performance and consistency by doing better than 20% annual compounded return in each of the one year, two year, three year and five year time frames.) This month that number has decreased slightly with 18 Canadian, 16 American and three Dividend funds in the mix, for a total of 37 funds.
Most of the funds from last month returned to the list, however the Saxon Stock Fund, the Cote 100 Amerique Fund, the GBC North American Growth Fund and the 20/20 Canadian Resources Fund didn't make the cut this time. New additions are Montrusco Select Growth and Teachers' RSP - Equity Section. The Montrusco fund and the Teachers' RSP must be renamed funds from earlier as there seems to be no listings for them in older newspapers, and yet they have a five year track record.
Representation by company: Two funds each from AGF, AIC, Bissett, McLean-Budden, and Spectrum United and once again, an incredible four funds from Phillips, Hager & North.
How did the Power Performers weather Grey Monday? Four made gains for the month, one stood still and the others were all down. The largest gain was for the Chou Associates Fund which went up 4.1% in October. The biggest loser was AGF American Growth, which lost 5.6% on the month. Thirteen of the funds lost more than 2% in October. Twenty-four had lesser losses or gained.
With the advent of GLOBEfund, I can now give you a list of the mutual funds doing better than 15% a year compounded over a fifteen year period. Here's a summary of this month's charts:
Carlson Online Services: I just discovered a superior site for stock research called Carlson Online Services. (I'm surprised I hadn't run across it before. It is a truly useful site.) Carlson indexes resources from all the Canadian stock exchanges and wire services. They have over 30,000 links to information on over 4500 Canadian companies. The folks at Carlson are kind enought to let other sites post a link to their powerful search engine on their own sites, so here they are. If you don't know the ticker symbol, use the company search.
You need not enter a complete company name in the company name search box. A partial string will do. For example, enter "gold" and you'll get all the companies with the word "gold" in their names.
Next Week's Feature: Part 3 of All That Glitters looks at gold and precious metals as an investment.
Coming soon: I just started reading George Cohon's To Russia With Fries and will do a review of the book sometime in the next month. Cohon is President and CEO of McDonald's Canada and was the man who introduced McDonald's to the USSR. He did a radio gig on his recent book tour and was fascinating to listen to. His book is proving to be equally entertaining. Watch for it.