Best-Performing Fund Families

TSC Ratings analyzes which names could be the best places to park your assets.
By Kevin Baker ,

With the close of the first quarter, the 426 fund families again vie for the few spots atop our quarterly "ultra" fund family competition.

There are two paths to victory in this contest. The initial way an investment management firm can be considered an "ultra" fund family is to place as many funds as possible on our quarterly top-200 list of open-end funds. This list is being published in section III of our Spring 2008 edition of

TheStreet.com Ratings Guide to Stock Mutual Funds

.

For the third quarter in a row, bigger is proving to be better. The same two families raised the bar, securing even more mutual funds in the top 200 than last quarter. Three more

Fidelity

funds made the list for a total of 18 spots.

Vanguard

also upped its game to 15 top-200 list funds from nine last quarter.

Two other investment houses reached double digits.

American Century Investments

placed 13 funds, while

ING Investments

, a unit of

ING Groep

(ING) - Get Report

had 11.

Honorable ultra-fund-family mention goes to

Ivy/Waddell & Reed

(WDR) - Get Report

with nine,

GE Investment

, a unit of

General Electric

(GE) - Get Report

with eight,

BlackRock

with seven, as well as

John Hancock

, a unit of

Manulife Financial

(MFC) - Get Report

, with five top-200 list funds.

BlackRock is 49%-owned by

Merrill Lynch

( MER), 34%-owned by

PNC Financial Services Group

(PNC) - Get Report

and 17%-owned by BlackRock

(BLK) - Get Report

employees and shareholders.

The second way we compare fund families is by breaking them into groups by size. This allows us 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+ do to B-. The middle 40% are fund grades of C+, C, and C-, with D+ and lower in the bottom 30%.

Jumping from eighth place at year's end to first place this quarter,

The Hartford Funds

(HIG) - Get Report

unseated the six-time ultra-fund family champion,

American Funds

, which fell to sixth.

MFS

moved up two spots to grab second place with 163 of its 291 rated funds being graded B- or better.

Alliance Bernstein

, a unit of

Axa

( AXA), with 52.7% top 30% funds, and

T. Rowe Price

(TROW) - Get Report

with 52.1% ranked third and fourth respectively.

The fifth-place large, ultra-fund family is Ivy/Waddell & Reed, which would have ranked first and third on the 40 to 99 table if considered separately, as had previously been the case. Here's another

recent article on that topic

.

The best-performing fund family with 40 to 99 rated funds, with nearly half of its funds ranking in the top 30%, is

Janus Fund

. This fund family made a dramatic quarter-to-quarter improvement, increasing its top-30% showing to 47.5% from 38.1%. It climbed all the way up from tenth place.

Eaton Vance

(EV) - Get Report

and GE Investment hold the second and third spots.

HSBC Asset Management

(HBC)

took first place among the smaller fund families, up from third place last quarter.

First Eagle

soared to second place, up from twelfth, with two-thirds of its rated funds in the top 30%.

An even more impressive move came from the third-place finisher,

Vantagepoint Funds

, as 10 more of its funds scored a B- rating or higher.

There are 291 fund families that have fewer than 10 rated open-end stock funds. Of these, only

Julius Baer Funds

( JBHGF) has four out of four rated funds in the top 30%.

The four fund families with three out of three funds in the top 30% are

BHH Mutual Funds

,

Cullen Funds

,

Industry Leaders Funds

and

Jamestown Funds/LB&C

.

For an explanation of our ratings,

click here

.

Kevin Baker became the senior financial analyst for TSC Ratings upon the August 2006 acquisition of Weiss Ratings by TheStreet.com, covering mutual funds. He joined the Weiss Group in 1997 as a banking and brokerage analyst. In 1999, he created the Weiss Group's first ratings to gauge the level of risk in U.S. equities. Baker received a B.S. degree in management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.B.A. with a finance specialization from Nova Southeastern University.

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