Mutual Funds
Making Money Anywhere
These great managers are not boxed in by a particular style.
By Andrew Tanzer, Senior Associate Editor
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, September 2007
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Investment legends like Peter Lynch, Warren Buffett and John Templeton are imaginative, instinctive types. When he ran Fidelity Magellan a generation ago, Lynch bought shares of everything from behemoths, such as Fannie Mae, to small local banks. Buffett also invests in companies of all sizes -- Coca-Cola, Moody's Investors Service and See's Candies, to name a few of varying sizes. Templeton roamed the globe and didn't care if a stock was labeled growth or value as long as it was a good buy.
Alas, the fund-management business has veered in the opposite direction. The rise of rigid, style-box investing has pigeonholed many a fund manager into uniform-size companies, a uniform investing style and narrow geographical confines. If you were in a large-company growth fund early in the decade, when large-growth stocks were hideously overvalued, you were out of luck. If a manager spots a gem that sits outside the fund's assumed stomping ground, he or she may have to leave it be.
Although Morningstar pioneered the style box, many industry veterans think financial advisers and consultants have hijacked the concept. "The investment-consulting community has perverted Morningstar's style box," says Osterweis Capital's John Osterweis. "It took something meant to be descriptive and made it prescriptive."
The good news is that investors can find plenty of excellent go-anywhere funds. Such funds allow the experts to decide where today's best opportunities reside, style box be damned. We'll tell you about six of them.
For Rob Gensler, the world is his oyster. "My opportunity set," he says, "is the entire $56-trillion market cap of the world." London-based Gensler picks stocks for T. Rowe Price Global Stock (symbol PRGSX) from this vast menu -- and logs a quarter of a million air miles
a year in pursuit of the right mix.
Nearly all of the fund's 74 holdings come from a list of 500 to 600 companies recommended by Price analysts and fund managers around the globe. Gensler, who was previously the ace manager of T. Rowe Price's Media & Telecom and Global Technology funds, is partial to growth stocks, preferring companies that increase earnings on the order of 20% a year. He particularly likes telecom operators in emerging markets, where the wireless-phone business is rapidly expanding. Because the developing world now accounts for more than half of global economic growth, Gensler prefers the U.S. and European companies he invests in to have exposure in emerging markets. At last word, his fund had 42% of assets in U.S. stocks and 55% in foreign names.
From the time Gensler took over in March 2005 to July 2, Global Stock returned an annualized 25%. Not one to mince words, he thinks he's hit on a good concept: "I feel strongly that 20 years from now, there will be only one investment approach -- a global approach."