There was little opportunity to escape the carnage this year. Investors have nearly $10 trillion in U.S. mutual funds, which own about a quarter of the shares of U.S. companies. With rare exception, investors have significantly less money on account now than at the beginning of the year.
You would expect the newsletters we receive from our fund managers to go into some detail about what’s gone wrong and what plans they have to keep our remaining money safe…and maybe even how they intend to earn some of it back.
According to a recent item on Yahoo News, you would be wrong.
Most funds are acting as if the events of 2007/2008 are the normal ups and downs of the market. The article notes that no funds have gone negative on the financial services companies that got us into this mess - no bad write-ups in their customer newsletters and certainly no use of voting power to introduce needed corporate-governance reforms.
I receive newsletters from six fund companies. Over the past year, five of them have done nothing more than advise “stay the course,” and upsell and cross-sell as if I had the desire to throw good money after bad.
But the sixth newsletter has forever marched to its own beat. Baron Funds has only seven mutual funds. Yet each quarter I get ten times the information and analysis and reassurance than from the other five combined.
Baron’s newsletter isn’t written by professional copywriters nor outsourced nor delivered on glossy paper. It is written by Ron Baron and his fund managers. It goes into detail about the companies in each fund - how it makes money, why Baron has invested, and the medium to long-term outlook.
Stories, history, cornball jokes, and completely made up rules of punctuation, grammar and syntax. Therein lies its beauty. You feel like a part of the family.
If you want to know what Ron Baron thinks about what’s gone wrong this year, you can read it yourself. Unlike other fund companies who have dodged it, Baron pre-empted his third-quarter newsletter with the transcript of his speech at Baron’s annual investors conference. It is available at baronfunds.com. You don’t even have to be a customer to get access to it.
Sounds like a throwback to a distant time, no? Sometimes that’s the best kind of marketing there is.
