A Mixed Bag for June

Maybe you've heard the Monty Python skit about Ralph Mellish. With melodramatic music popping up in appropriate (or inappropriate places) the narrator tells the story of Ralph Mellish who gets up and goes to work and scarcely able to believe his eyes, glances behind a bush along the side of the road and notices "no severed arm, no dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties, no head in a bag. Nothing. Not a sausage."

For Ralph, it seems, this was not to be the start of any trail of events which would lead to murder, mayhem and the Old Bailey.

June's mutual funds could have been leading the life of Ralph Mellish. No telltale sign of leadership. No runaway performance. Nothing to put a hook into. Nothing!

If May was a mixed bag for mutual fund performance June was even more so with no clear sector or category of funds leading the pack. The Top 25 Funds for one month as tallied at The Vancouver Sun website showed 6 specialty funds (of varying types), 5 science and technology (including medical) funds, 4 US equity funds, 4 resource funds, 3 small cap funds, 2 balanced funds and a bond fund.

The markets are continuing to show weakness and the worst may not yet be over. There are some concerns that, as far as many stocks have fallen, they could fall further. Why? Because while stocks have fallen, their earnings have fallen even faster.

Alan Greenspan is hinting strongly that he may have to reduce interest rates even more. The concensus view sees two more cuts by year's end. While cuts have served to stimulate the market in the past, the current wave of cuts which began in January have yet to bear significant fruit.

The market may very well be forming a bottom, but wariness is not out of the question. Certainly value and resource funds seem to be beckoning. We wait. We watch.

Rank	Fund	Type	1 Month	3 Month	1 Year
1	Friedberg Equity-Hedge Fund	Specialty	7.65%	6.37%	21.26%
2	AGF Global Total Return Bond Fund	Bond	6.21%	3.11%	-4.29%
3	Capital Alliance Ventures Inc. (LSVCC)	Specialty	6.02%	11.58%	-11.32%
4	Mac Cundill Recovery Fund Class C U$	Balanced	4.98%	18.35%	16.43%
5	Fidelity Small Cap America Fund U$	Small Cap	4.14%	16.28%	40.18%
6	BMO Precious Metals Fund	Resource	4.11%	21.28%	27.05%
7	Franklin World Health Sciences & Biotech U$	Sci & Tech	4.00%	15.24%	-4.96%
8	Goodwood Fund	Specialty	3.74%	11.56%	30.42%
9	TIP Equity Monetization Class B	Specialty	3.70%	16.14%	-
10	COTE VTA American Equity Fund	US Equity	3.57%	7.86%	-3.83%

For the first time since we started doing these charts we have no Power Performers. Not one. Not a single stock returning better than 20% per year for 1 year, 3 year and 5 year growth. Even the venerable Resolute Growth Fund which had managed to weather the downturn in the market admirably well in the last year (it's been our only Power Performer for months) dropped five year performance below 20%

But the number of our Strong Performers has climbed up a bit. It now stands at 8.

Where will it go from here? We can only guess. Far better to observe the action in the market and act accordingly. We could well be near a bottom. Or the markets could go lower. Don't try and guess. Observe.