Fidelity Beats Rivals in Mutual Fund Rankings

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Fidelity Investments had more top-rated mutual funds among 413 rival firms in TheStreet.com Ratings' quarterly review.

The list of A and A-plus funds, which is being published in TheStreet.com Ratings' "Summer 2009 Guide to Stock Mutual Funds" by Grey House Publishing, includes 20 of Fidelity's 662 rated funds. It's the eighth consecutive "Ultra" Fund Family victory, a competition set up by TheStreet.com Ratings, for Boston-based Fidelity.

The runner-up, with nine funds on a list of 200, is ING Investments, a unit of ING Groep(ING Quote).

The top 200 competition is like the Tour de France's "King of the Mountains" race. TheStreet.com Ratings also does a more comprehensive review of the 414 fund families, more reminiscent of the Tour's overall "General Classification Yellow Jersey" winner.

For a fund family to bring home the winner's yellow jersey, it needs to place the highest percentage of funds rated in the top 30% of all open-end funds, compared with other fund families of similar size. The top 30% represents overall investment grades of A-plus to B-minus. The middle 40% have fund grades of C-plus, C and C-minus, with D-plus and lower in the bottom 30%.

In the "Ultra" Fund Family competition, Van Kampen, a unit of Morgan Stanley(MS Quote), won by having a higher percentage of its portfolio of funds ranked in the top 30%, or "buy" range, than any of the other fund families with 100 or more rated funds. Van Kampen rose from fourth place last quarter to first with 44.7% of its 159 rated funds in the top category.