TheStreet.com Ratings: Betting On a New Manager

Until the biotech industry concocts a remedy, only one buffer currently stands between the ardent sports fan and a complete nervous breakdown resulting from withdrawal after the last whistle of the final playoff game. It's the inevitable week or two of musical chairs as the coaches of losing teams are ritualistically axed and replaced by coaches who happen to be, as the cliché goes, "ready for new challenges."

The sport of mutual fund investing isn't all that different.

The logic of team owners seems to be that it makes more sense to fire one head coach rather than the complete roster of players. Similarly, mutual fund management firms sometimes appear to be driven by the logic that replacing a fund manager is easier than admitting that all the investments in the fund are wrong.

However, just as replacing a coach is no guarantee of a quick Super Bowl trophy, changing fund managers is unlikely to catapult shareholders onto Forbes' list of billionaires. To put this theory to the test, we screened open-end funds with low ratings scores that experienced a turnover during the last three months of 2005 -- an admittedly arbitrary time period -- to see whether any upgrades resulted.

Of course, there's no way of knowing whether the funds' ratings had anything to do with the change in management. But the turnover provides an opportunity to test the efficacy of changing managers, regardless of why it occurred.