This Fund Is So Good It's Scary

Heebner last disclosed his holdings during interviews in August, including one on CNBC and one with Kiplinger's.

He could not be reached for comment for this article.

Larry Glazer, portfolio manager at Mayflower Advisors in Boston, puts it well. "It's so focused, it's almost like a sector fund. It just changes sectors from time to time," he says.

CGM Focus is now up 69% so far this year. There are no prizes for guessing that it is at the head of the class.

That's also true over the past one, five and 10 years.

Heebner supposedly earned the nickname Mad Bomber for the way he barrelled out of some stocks and into others.

He's a familiar figure around Boston's financial district. Other labels that get tossed around are Mad Genius and Mad Professor. You get the picture. Brilliant, and idiosyncratic.

It's no surprise that the mainstream finance industry, with its absurd "style" boxes, has difficulty pigeon holing him.

Mid-cap value? Large-cap growth? Heebner simply invests where he sees the best opportunities.

He's happy putting his Realty Fund in mining companies as well as mere real estate investment trusts. No wonder it's up a stunning 34% so far this year, while the real estate market has slumped.

Regular readers of this column will also spot many of the other characteristics of a really good mutual fund manager. Such as: Heebner has been around for decades (he's 66). He's seen it all. And he owns his own fund company, so he doesn't have to answer to some office bureaucrat.

Heebner is one of those fund managers that the "index" crowd likes to tell you don't really exist. They argue there's no point trying to beat the market over the long term. Or trying to "time" it so you get in or out of specific stocks at the right moment.

Sure, you can't always be right. Heebner made some wrong bets in the late nineties and fell behind the curve.

But he's been right a lot more than he's been wrong, and it shows.

Over the past 10 years, an index fund tracking the Standard & Poor's 500 has turned $10,000 into about $19,900.

Heebner's CGM Realty Fund: $63,000.

As for his Focus Fund? Try $83,100. And counting.

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