MVC Capital Worth Another Look

Editor's note: This is the second of five stories looking at the past year and at the year ahead in mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. The first story looked at real estate funds that crashed and burned in 2007.

A common refrain in my articles about new investment products is that you need to give them time to prove themselves in the market before buying.

Well, I recently took another look at a quirky product from the Internet era that I find intriguing. You may remember that, during the venture capital boom of the late 1990s, one of the VC firms came out with a product that was intended to make this kind of investment accessible to all through the public market: the (MVC Quote)MVC Capital Fund (formerly known as the ME VC Draper Fisher Fund).

The fund has a long and eventful track record. The launch was poorly timed, and performance stalled for a few years as shareholders and management quarreled over the fund's structure and what to do with the capital raised. ...