Indian Funds Lead Foreign Pack

The beauty of building wealth in the 21st century is that we have the freedom to choose from a wide variety of professionally managed investment vehicles, depending on how much time we want to spend managing our money.

For passive investors and investment professionals under onerous trading restrictions, there are complete all-in-one solutions from asset-allocation funds that gradually get more conservative over the decades. And for investors with the time, inclination and savvy, there are ample choices for micro-managing each portion of your portfolio, right down to the selection of individual country weightings. That's the role geographically focused funds play.

The fortunate individuals who outsourced their global allocation to India were richly rewarded this week. Four of the 10 best-performing, geographically focused funds specialized in Indian companies.

At 12.85% for the five trading days ending Nov. 1, none did better than the iPath MSCI India Index ETN (INP Quote). This is an exchange-traded note, which is similar to an exchange-traded fund. The difference is that ETNs are designed to have less tracking error than ETFs so that the value of the investment more closely mirrors that of the underlying index. ...