According to Morningstar, real estate mutual funds returned 9.4% in the first quarter of 2010, one of the highest return of any mutual fund category.
The average return for the 9, 402 mutual funds tracked by Morningstar was a negative 17.8 percent for the quarter.
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Last week Morningstar, the biggest rater of mutual funds, announced that subscribers could now track 1, 600 hedge funds on its website.
According to Morningstar.com, the ten largest mutual funds by assets had an average turnover ratio of almost 75%.
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Morningstar tracks just a handful of Japan mutual funds, and some, including the two no-load Hennessy funds, have comparatively high fees.
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Laura Pavlenko Lutton, who heads the mutual funds governance project at Morningstar, insists that a connection exists between the independence of the boards and the likelihood of better performance.
In fact, Morningstar categorizes more than 60 municipal bond mutual funds as intermediate, of which several use one of the BarCap Municipal intermediate indices or similar index as a performance benchmark.
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According to Morningstar data, there were 29 distinct alternative strategy mutual funds launched in 2009, while 38 have been launched this year through Nov. 28.
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Dan Culloton, a senior fund analyst at Morningstar, says ETFs have a variety of advantages over mutual funds, including lower costs and better tax treatments.
Small-cap value, small-cap growth, mid-cap value, and mid-cap growth mutual funds were each down about 3%, according to Morningstar.
In the first quarter, just 35% of actively managed U.S. stocks-focused mutual funds returned more than the indexes they use as benchmarks, according to research firm Morningstar.
Morningstar's "long-short" mutual-fund category includes market-neutral and absolute-return funds, which are designed to generate returns in any market environment, and arbitrage funds, which try to exploit market inefficiencies.
About one-third of all U.S. stock mutual funds own Apple's stock, up from 21% five years ago, according to Morningstar.
Survivorship bias is most likely to pump up trailing returns "in the smaller, quirkier, more volatile categories, " where a lot of funds "wash out, " says Russel Kinnel, director of mutual-fund research at Morningstar.
The "Portfolio" section of Morningstar.com also has an "Instant X-Ray" tool, which shows you how much of your mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are in specific stocks.
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