The 2012 Kiplinger 25: The Best No-Load Mutual Funds to Meet Your Goals

This year’s picks for the Kiplinger 25 include new ways to generate income.

Eight percent a year. That’s the magic number many retirement calculators use for the assumed long-term return of stocks. The awful truth is that over the past decade, it’s been a difficult number to achieve. The broad stock market, as measured by Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, fell far short, returning just 3.7% annualized over the past ten years. But here’s the not-so-awful truth: Many mutual funds have done better than that. Much better. Some are members of our very own Kiplinger 25 -- the list of our favorite no-load funds.

Fidelity Contrafund (symbol FCNTX), for example, has gained an annualized return of 7.9% over the past ten years. Fidelity Low-Priced Stock (FLPSX) has done even better: an average of 9.3% a year. And T. Rowe Price Small-Cap Value (PRSVX)? 9.3% (all returns are through March 9). Those are the kinds of results we aim for when we pick the Kip 25 funds. And after the generally lousy stock market perform­ance of the past decade, the chances are good that the next ten years will be much kinder to stock market investors and stock-owning funds.

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Nellie S. Huang
Senior Associate Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

Nellie joined Kiplinger in August 2011 after a seven-year stint in Hong Kong. There, she worked for the Wall Street Journal Asia, where as lifestyle editor, she launched and edited Scene Asia, an online guide to food, wine, entertainment and the arts in Asia. Prior to that, she was an editor at Weekend Journal, the Friday lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal Asia. Kiplinger isn't Nellie's first foray into personal finance: She has also worked at SmartMoney (rising from fact-checker to senior writer), and she was a senior editor at Money.