Best Fund You Never Heard Of

Who has had the most successful "general" stock fund over the past few years? Legg Mason(LM)? Fidelity? American Funds?

Nope. You've probably never heard of Kailash Birmiwal, or of his tiny (BIRMX)Birmiwal Oasis (BIRMX) fund. But Lipper and Morningstar say this obscure and mysterious fund is shooting out the lights.

Oasis opened for business only four years ago, but Lipper calculates that it has already turned $10,000 into $28,000. That's three times the profits you would have made in an S&P index fund over that period. Morningstar, which gives Oasis a five-star rating, believes the performance figure is even higher.

They are, incidentally, unable to explain the discrepancy. Birmiwal, who runs the fund, probably holds the answer, but he is hard to track down ... and when I finally reached him, he refused to be interviewed. Best guess: The fund hands back such a huge chunk of its profits to investors each year that this may be confusing the "total return" calculations.

Either way, both Lipper and Morningstar say the fund is a superstar. It's up another 9.24% already this year. Oasis, alas, closed to new investors in January of last year -- less than three years after opening.

Such apparent success inevitably piqued my interest. Birmiwal's refusal to talk made me even more intrigued. So I went hunting through the public filings to find out what I could. And they revealed a lot about the elements of successful investing. With apologies to Leo Tolstoy, every unhappy mutual fund is unhappy in its own way, while all happy mutual funds are alike.