MFO Ratings Through 4th Quarter >> implying along the possibility of
>> comparing versus manager tenure.
>> If funds did not perform after changes in management,
\\\ Sentence structure and punctuation make a huge difference in reading.
No kiddin'.
>> our database does not account for category drift...or, manager drift, sad to say...past performance, numbers only.
I have an idea. How about a cell or field for manager tenure? In years. There's a number.
In fact, I may be misremembering FA HR, but did not Weitz et alia have something along those lines?
>> Of the 1800 or so surviving funds that have been around 20 years, only about 30 are top quintile across all five evaluation periods (20, 10, 5, 3, and 1 year), yes even in 2014.
>> Some of them are: ...
>> Meridian Growth Legacy (MERDX)
The current managers of this venerable fund have been on the job for like a year and a half. Gosh and golly, should I invest in it? I pray it has magical momentum. I wonder how the new guys will do. Is there any way to tell? Does the brandname confer skill? Were they trainees?
Well, no, no, and who the hell knows? It is a scandal this is an MFO Great Owl. Makes the site look ridiculous. People are always going off about Fidelity manager tenure and turnover, and here this venerable site dares to list effectively a brand-new fund as a Great Owl. Makes all the wonderful data work that goes into the effort dubious.
Here is M* from a few months ago:
\\\ This mid-growth fund's future was uncertain after Rick Aster, the lead manager since its 1984 inception, passed away in early 2012. Other investors from his team then oversaw the portfolio, but most had other funds to manage as well and Aster's eponymous firm was left rudderless. In 2013, Arrowpoint Partners (founded by three former Janus portfolio managers in 2007) agreed to purchase Aster's firm and take over the fund. Arrowpoint hired Chad Meade and Brian Schaub, who amassed a superb seven-year record at Janus Triton (JATTX), away from Janus to run the Meridian fund. They took over in September 2013 following a shareholder vote.
\\\ Meade and Schaub's early returns here are subpar; the fund trails both its typical peer and the Russell 2500 Growth Index (a mix of small- and mid-cap stocks that also served as the benchmark for Janus Triton) by 3 and 2 percentage points, respectively. But they've demonstrated an ability to pick winners among both rapid growers and more-stable fare over the longer haul. A six-person analyst team that includes several former Janus colleagues supports them, and they are working with a smaller asset base than they had in their last two years at Triton.
Seriously, is it too much to ask for a trigger or criterion screen having to do with manager tenure, so brand-new funds, whatever their name, do not get the highest designation this site has to offer? An absurd situation.
Which energy etf would you buy? XLE, VDE or ? Non-MLP types.....
For Healthcare Investors, A Medical Breakthrough ETF. Geez, these NURO guys are getting NO credit! Market cap is $13MN. This is tiny of the tiny and it doesn't look like there's been any real bounce from the announcement that they were going to introduce the product. If it does well I guess this will be a superstar investment, but right now it seems like no one's willing to bet on that.
I wrote a bunch on Friday night about the exoskeleton companies, didn't quite finish, and then Windows kindly installed updates overnight and restarted my computer so I lost it. The basic gist was that you can see what funds/etfs own Ekso, Cyberdyne and ReWalk in this ownership section of M*'s quote page for each. These guys all went public in 2014 and there's not much interest from funds, although Ekso is clearly the least "discovered" and maybe you could even say its undiscovered considering the only fund that owns it is called 3D Printing and Technology and it has a whopping $2.8 million in AUM. Ekso seems to be the one with ties to the military and they're clearly getting funding from the military to develop those applications. Cyberdyne is the biggest in terms of market cap and seems to have made good progress in Germany, getting their product covered by state medical.
My conclusion was that Ekso seems like the most interesting opportunity at the moment because of their ties to the military, because they're clearly not discovered and because one of their 2015 goals is to be listed on a primary exchange. In addition, what's written about them on their own site and by Forbes is that they have the best technology out there. The biggest risk I see is that they say they'll need cash by the middle of this year and that'll mean dilution, but they've been very open about that so maybe its priced in. ReWalk has FDA approval, which is nice and they're in a better cash position than Ekso plus they've also made inroads with Germany, but somehow it just seems like they don't have as broad a relationship base as Ekso does in terms of future potential.
Thanks JC for bringing this up!
