Stock Mutual Fund Rankings Mutual Fund Companies Stock Mutual Fund Rankings I've been investing in mutual funds since sometime in the 1960s. Over the years I've gradually developed a method for determining which funds should receive the bulk of my investments. I suspect most people would pick fund A. After all, its performance either equalled or beat that of fund B in all three time periods. Its performance beat that of fund A in 4 of the 5 years. That's just one of the issues that led me to develop my own ranking system.
Total return includes price change plus reinvestment of all distributions.
No allowance for any taxes, purchase or redemption fees, account maintenance fees, etc., that might be payable by any shareholder is taken into account. For any specific fund, the most recent year's performance is somewhat more important than the prior year's, which is somewhat more important than the year before that, etc. The weighting assigned to any given year is partially dependent on the number of funds for which performance data was available for that year. This means, for example, that having the best performance out of 10 funds is not as important as having the best performance out of 20 funds. If a fund was the best performer in every year it would receive the maximum score of 100, while one that was less than 5 years old would have little chance of achieving a score above 50.