Fidelity Manages Most Top-Performing Funds

The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII for football supremacy and the Vince Lombardi trophy. At TheStreet.com Ratings, we have our "Ultra" Fund Family Bowl XI. In this 11th quarterly ratings competition among the 417 fund families, our top two contenders, Fidelity and Van Kampen, stake their claim for the Baker trophy.

The first of two "Ultra" Fund Family bowl spots goes to the investment-management firms placing the most "starting players" on our quarterly top-200 list of open-end funds. This list is being published in section III of our winter 2008-09 edition of "TheStreet.com Ratings Guide to Stock Mutual Funds."

Fidelity, with 19 funds among the top 200, is working on an "Ultra" Fund Family Bowl dynasty with its sixth consecutive visit to the big game. Division champs getting knocked out in the playoffs this quarter were ING Investments, a subsidiary of ING Group(ING Quote) and Vanguard, with eight funds, and American Century Investments and Transamerica Funds, a unit of AEGON NV(AEG Quote), with seven funds on the top 200.

Wild-card spots went to DWS Scudder, a division of Deutsche Bank(DB Quote), Ivy/Waddell & Reed Funds, a unit of Waddell & Reed Financial(WDR Quote), and ProFunds, each with 5 top-ranked funds.

The second route to the top of the "Ultra" Fund Family competition takes a more comprehensive view. Beyond just the starters, each fund family has to send all their second-string players and benchwarmers into the game, too.

To measure this, we break investment companies into groups by size to see which firms have the highest percentage of funds ranked in the top 30% of all open-end funds in comparison to other fund families of similar size. The top 30% represents overall investment grades of A+ down to B-. The middle 40% are fund grades of C+, C and C-, with D+ and lower in the bottom 30%.