The following is an excerpt from SUZANNE MCGEE | October 5, 2012 | thefiscaltimes.com |
What does it take to beat the stock market? Well, one of the ingredients would seem to be a large helping of “sticktoitiveness” – the ability to focus on the long-term potential for your investments rather than allow yourself to be distracted by short-term market noise – coupled with an ability to make some of that short-term turbulence your ally.
Just ask Mark Mulholland. He’s the manager of the relatively small Matthew 25 fund (MXXVX). It has only about $250 million in assets; far short of the billions overseen by some of its peers. But so far this year Matthew 25 is ahead 35 percent, nearly double the return generated by the S&P 500. Over the three last calendar years, the fund is up an average of 30 percent a year, compared to 15 percent for the S&P. Over the last five years, Matthew 25 is ahead an annualized 6.54 percent; the S&P is up only 1.13 percent. The margin narrows in the ten-year period, according to data from Morningstar, but Mulholland’s fund is still ahead, it widens out again for the 15-year period, in the fund’s favor.
Mulholland also is beating his peers of late. At the end of every quarter, I sit down and review which mutual fund managers have done best over the last 12 months, and talk to some of them for an article that appears in The Wall Street Journal. For the last three quarters, Mulholland has led the pack. I’m not specifically recommending his fund, but I am suggesting that there are a few things you can learn from the way he thinks about investing.
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