Smarter Money: The Berkshire Focus Fund Delivers

Sometimes persistence pays off. For the client! About a year and a half ago I started receiving these unsolicited heads-ups about the (BFOCX Quote)Berkshire Focus Fund from the fund's manager, Malcolm R. Fobes III. I am a suspicious guy and I get a lot of emails. I figured the guy was pulling my leg, and I sent him some wise-ass comment back about "where's the R?" or something like that.

He persisted and told me that he was right in the heart of Silicon Valley and that he knew tech. I checked his fund out and he sure enough, the guy knew what he was talking about. He had spotted the fiber-optic play well ahead of others and recognized that you wanted to be in suppliers to the Web companies, not the Web companies themselves. He shot out the lights and finished up 104% last year.

Normally, that scares me. I figure the guy gets inundated with money and screws it up the next year. I figure that to beat the averages he has to turn into a Buzz and Batch marketing machine. But I figure wrong. And Fobes keeps delivering. So when I went to dole out money to my 50 mutual funds as part of my long-term mutual fund project, I sent $2,500 smackers to Fobes and his Berkshire Focus Fund.

And what happens? I am staring at my trusty Schwab Customer Center rundown, where I keep all my funds because the product is incredibly easy to use and keeps track of a large number of managers, and Berkshire's right up there challenging Amerindo B2B, my No. 1 fund, for maximum profits. He's doing it with all of the right stocks, the high-growth semis and networkers and many of the stocks I talk about regularly in my columns. Can he sustain it? I don't know. But you could have said that last year and you would have lost out on a ton of performance. If the tech market takes a hiccup, this might just be the highflying fund you want to put some money into on the next break. I am glad I did.