What are we looking for?
Stars over the past decade.
Last week, we screened for the dogs among investment funds over the past 10 years. Now, let's see the big winners.
The screen
We looked for the 15 funds with the best track records for the 10 years ended Aug. 31. U.S. dollar, segregated and duplicate versions of the funds were excluded.
What did we find?
Lots of glitter from precious metals funds.
RBC Global Precious Metals, a bank mutual fund that invests mainly in gold miners, emerged at the top with an eye-popping 31.5-per-cent average annual return.
The fund has been run by Chris Beer of RBC Global Asset Management since 2003. In addition to picking the right stocks and riding a gold price soaring 620 per cent over 10 years, lower fees [2.04 to 2.09 per cent in recent years] compared with peers also has helped returns.
While the gold price hit a record high of over $1,900 (U.S.) an ounce in August, it fell sharply to the $1,680-level during last week's market slide. "It is like the global financial crisis [in 2008]," said Mr. Beer. "People are selling anything which is not tied down, including gold and gold stocks."
Despite the pullback, he sees the price of the metal recovering and surpassing the $2,000-level. "We are in a 11-year bull market for gold," he said. "The issues driving gold are going to be in place for some time… Unless governments are able to solve their fiscal deficits, I still see a move away from fiat currencies for a hard asset that is not managed by central bankers."
During the past decade, the fund has owned stocks such as Goldcorp Inc. Last year, the senior gold producer bought Andean Resources Ltd., also in the fund, "so our Goldcorp position has increased from that acquisition," he said. "We had a large position in Red Back Mining, which was acquired by Kinross and now we own Kinross. But our favourite large cap is probably Goldcorp."
While gold stocks have lagged the price of bullion this year, Mr. Beer expects that trend to reverse itself "as people become more comfortable with the gold price being at an elevated level [which will affect analysts' targets], and the companies begin to pay larger dividends."