@LewisBraham... luckily I didn't own the fund then but using 2008 as the basis of your comment misses how they dealt with those losses. As Dr. Snowball reported in his 2013 review of the fund, "Indeed, OBIOX in 2013 isn’t even the OBIOX of 2009. During the 2007-09 market trauma, OBIOX suffered a 69.7% drop, well worse than their peers’
57.7% decline. The manager was deeply dissatisfied with that performance and took concrete steps to strengthen his risk management disciplines. OBIOX is a distinctive fund and seems to have grown stronger."
That's not to suggest it can't still perform poorly but if you look at the upside and downside capture ratios over the last 3 and
5 years, they've done pretty well. To your point, the last 12 months haven't been great, but if you can deal with the volatility then the results over time have rewarded you with good risk adjusted returns.
One of the things that amazes me is the tax efficiency. It's a very high turnover fund, higher than I prefer by a lot, and M*'s tax cost ratio is very low. I haven't figured out exactly how they manage that based on the available information and I don't always trust M*'s numbers to tell me what I think they're telling me, but in absolute terms it's an impressive ratio that seems inconsistent with their turnover.
