Best-Performing Funds Over the Past 20 Years

Oct. 19, 1987, Black Monday produced the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history. But for many buy-and-hold mutual fund investors, it proved to be little more than a relatively brief, albeit painful, bump along a path of long-term, annualized double-digit returns.

The mutual fund world was a different place two decades ago. Of the 7,256 open-end mutual funds currently tracked by TheStreet.com Ratings, only 914 were around at the end of September 1987. Back then, corporate America was only starting to migrate employees from traditional, defined-benefit pension plans into defined-contribution 401(k) plans.

For this and other reasons, funds tended to have fewer share classes than they do today. Of 20,536 current fund share classes, fewer than 10%, or 1,990, existed in September 1987.

Most of the open-end equity funds available 20 years ago were relatively vanilla products. Leveraged funds, "inverse" funds and emerging markets funds had yet to dominate the lists of winners and losers. ...